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Mike Champion wrote:
> 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
The workshop announcement is now available:
http://www.w3.org/2003/07/binary-xml-cfp.html
As you can see, it is indeed open to the public provided an interesting position
paper is submitted as Mike had suggested.
> 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"
I very much agree that opening a discussion on the topic of binary infosets is
to decide to tread on potentially dangerous grounds. However, full-on "it just
sucks" frontal attacks are no more likely to be helpful than blind advocacy. At
best it'll polarize the debate in an unhealthy manner, and in the long run it
will cause people to stop listening to valid objections appearing here and there
in the noise.
To take my turn addressing Elliotte's post (http://www.ibiblio.org/xml/#recent ,
24/07/2003), here are a few things I'd like to point out:
- "binary XML (an oxymoron if ever there was one)"
I very much agree, which is why I coined the term "binary infosets" a few
months back. I find it unfortunate to see that while the workshop cfp itself
avoids the term, its URL and other pieces of W3C communication around it reuse
it. This can only add to the confusion.
Adding even more confusion is the fact that the CFP pretty much puts gzip up
against ASN.1 when there are many more solutions, and puts a strong emphasis on
size when it is possibly the least important problem. I guess these are details
that will be ironed out at the workshop.
- "They falsely believe that binary formats are significantly faster or smaller
than XML, which is almost never true in practice"
We have experienced frequent benefits in compression and speed (amongst other
things) and we know we aren't the only ones. Hopefully the workshop will be a
good place to discuss these. I am including benchmarks in my position paper,
which will be published after the workshop.
If you have a large body of experiments showing that interesting research you
have done in the field of binary infosets does almost never yield faster or
smaller formats then by all means please do submit a position paper with your
numbers and experiments. If not, where do you get those claims from?
- "Worse yet, some vendors are deliberately trying to lock developers into their
patented, closed, binary, "XML" formats so they can sell their tools. The
patents probably wouldn't survive through the W3C process, but they still hope
to be able to complicate XML enough that programmers will buy their editors and
APIs, rather than using simple, free tools like emacs and Xerces like they are now."
Since there are only so many binary infosets vendors, and I work for one, I
can only feel directly attacked here. You make serious accusations, show your
proofs or admit to be spreading FUD.
If we had been trying to lock people into patented and closed formats, we
would have tried our best to keep the W3C or any other open consortium away from
the area. However, that's hardly been the case. Despite the "W3C is evil"
permathread, I also believe that the same argument applies to your "complicate
XML" scare-mongering.
Oh, and incidentally we've toyed with having a normal free editor sit on top
of binarised documents. It would probably be easy to make it complete.
- "Text XML is too simple to sell tools for"
I think a few people might just disagree with that...
- "The binary formats actually already exist, and the market has ignored them
with a resounding silence."
Can you support that with any proof? We are doing quite fine in a not so nice
economy.
- "I suspect these vendors see W3C standardization as a last ditch effort to
convince programmers to buy a technology they don't want and don't need"
In my experience, that's hardly how the W3C works.
- "as long as they don't call their formats XML"
Well, since no one is calling it that...
- "There are no alternate serializations for the XML Infoset besides Unicode
characters in angle brackets"
And yet there are. And readily available. As more domains come up with their
own partial solution to the issue, the space becomes cluttered and
interoperability suffers.
I believe it takes true textual fanatics to make a good binary infosets format,
which is why I very much look forward to this workshop.
--
Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@expway.fr>
Research Engineer, Expway http://expway.fr/
7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
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