[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
Since this seems to be "old permathread week" at xml-dev, let's revisit
another ...I had been waiting for the W3C to publicize the upcoming Binary
XML workshop before talking about it on xml-dev, but the meme is loose in
the wild thanks to Marc Hadley (http://weblogs.java.net/pub/wlg/263) and
Elliotte Rusty Harold (http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/) Apparently the
announcement will be made publicly readable "real soon now" (presumably the
delay was to give dues paying W3C members a bit of a head start), and my
understanding is that non-W3C members will be allowed to present position
papers and attend if they are accepted.
Elliote's commentary actually echos the disclaimers at the top of the
(still private) meeting announcement, and a deeply rooted sentiment in
parts of the W3C that this whole idea is the "spawn of the devil" (quoting
literally from some very well known people who can identify themselves if
they wish!).
Elliotte makes a couple of points that illustrate very clearly what is at
stake here:
"Some developers either don't believe or don't get XML's value proposition
of a compatible, interoperable, editable, text format." - I suspect that
everyone believes that, but some see it as only one dimension of a multi-
dimensional value space, and others see it as a sine qua non.
"They falsely believe that binary formats are significantly faster or
smaller than XML, which is almost never true in practice" - AFAIK, that's
exactly what the workshop is trying to determine: What is the evidence that
'binary XML' can be faster or smaller in realistic scenarios. My
understanding (from a lot of inputs, most of which I can't discuss) is that
the "bloat" issue is a red herring because gzip works wonderfully on XML
text, but that there is an approximately one order of magnitude processing
overhead of XML compared with the previous generation of RPC, asynchronous
messaging, and EDI technology. An order of magnitude here, and a recession
there, and soon you've got problems that Moore's Law doesn't solve anytime
soon.
"Worse yet, some vendors are deliberately trying to lock developers into
their patented, closed, binary, "XML" formats" -- Perhaps, but again the
whole point of the workshop is to determine whether an open standard would
be useful in preventing this scenario *if* tangible benefits can be
demonstrated. I think there are a lot more vendors who realize that
various aspects of XML's text format cause significant overhead, but won't
even think about alternatives unless there is some standardization to allow
interoperability. FWIW, that describes my employer's position [or rather,
the consensus of us geeks who have looked into the matter, obviously not
the "official" company line].
"The binary formats actually already exist, and the market has ignored them
with a resounding silence. They have achieved no traction and no interest
in the community." -- Interesting point ... I don't see it this way, but
would love to see some discussion about it.
" These are toxic technologies that serve no one's interests. They
significantly compromise the XML promise of interoperable, interchangeable
data that can be processed by a host of free, simple, readily available
tools." -- The main counter-argument that I'm seeing is that XML-based
projects/applications are having a hard time making the transition from
"concept proven" to "actually deployed" in mainstream, non-early-adopter
businesses. "Bloated" and "sluggish" are frequently used at least in the
recent trade press articles slamming XML, and AFAIK this stems at least in
part from from the problems real people are seeing when they plan to scale
up a proof-of-concept XML project to a "bet the business" proposition. I
agree that only a small minority of "XML" users will need to exchange
binary infoset serializations, but we will *all* benefit by having a growth
path from free/simple/text tools to industrial-strength "bet the business
on" technologies.
Anyway, flame away .... I need to figure out what to say in my position
paper :-)
--
|
