[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 10:39 AM -0400 4/11/04, Stephen D. Williams wrote:
>Optimized XML is XML which has been tweaked to retain its existing
>advantages while improving those aspects that need improving in
>various circumstances. I.e. better (or no) parsing, serialization,
>memory usage, CPU, size, avoidance of encoding (of binary image data
>for instance), fidelity, etc.
XML is text. There is no binary data in XML. You can encode text in
binary, and you can encode binary in text using a variety of
algorithms. However, if you're directly encoding binary data in your
format that is not somehow a representation of text, then it is
clearly not a representation of XML. It is something els, and that
something else may be useful (I certainly don't think digital
photographs should be encoded in XML) but it is still not XML. Not
only that it cannot be processed with standard XML tools and APIs.
XSLT, SAX, DOM, XPath, XQuery, XOM, have no means of representing
arbitrary binary data. The "avoidance of encoding (of binary image
data for instance)" means you've clearly moved beyonds the realm of
XML. What you are then proposing is a new format, not an optimization
of XML.
--
Elliotte Rusty Harold
elharo@metalab.unc.edu
Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA
|
