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On Nov 18, 2003, at 7:49 PM, Joshua Allen wrote:
>
> Well, as I understand the examples I've seen, some of the problems with
> these binary formats is that they tended to evolve, and the new
> information embedded in the binary stream is not always added in a way
> that is most amenable to efficient parsing. So the idea of "fast
> binary" made sense at V1 of the protocol, but things become a mess over
> time and much of the supposed benefits of binary parsing are reduced by
> all the special-casing code.
Ahh, that has the ring of truth! Thanks.
>
> I'm definitely not talking about optimizations that take a shared
> schema. We got pretty dramatic improvements in parse speed between V1
> and V2 of our parsers (caveat, not shipping, so no official promises,
> but...) And this is pure text parsing; and as far as I have seen, our
> V1 parser was pretty fast compared to most of the parsers out there
> that
> people complain about being slow.
OK, good to know. IBM made a very similar point at the workshop; I may
have mis-remembered the dependence on a schema.
> Same goes for XML-text; it is great for interop, great for hierarchical
> access to data, semistructured/document data and so on -- but sometimes
> you want something more tightly-coupled. Nothing worng with that, but
> just don't call it interop.
Well, the whole point of the W3C discussions is to explore whether
there is an optimum number of standard serializations for the Infoset
other than 1 and only 1. Some argue that maybe one more still allows
an acceptable degree of interop (assuming of course that text is always
the fallback). Others (such as myself) are open to maybe 2-3 more for
specialized environments where, for example, bandwidth must be
optimized while processing minimized (wireless), parsing performance is
critical but bandwidth is cheap (web services infrastructure), and
maybe one more (perhaps ASN.1) for situations where you want to
exchange objects/PSVI/XQuery data models and you can assume that both
sides agree on the schema. So IMHO, interop is quite possible *if*
there are a small number of widely supported serialization standards
and XML text is mandated as the fallback in content negotiation
protocols.
>
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