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Rick Marshall wrote:
>it's precisely the end tag that is important. if you use a binary format
>how do you know the end of the data is the end of the data? and how do
>you know it is well formed? i don't think you can without a lot of other
>overhead. checksums on tag content etc.
>
>and it still has to be byte oriented to be portable. come to think of
>it, it wasn't until agreement was reached on 8 bit bytes that a lot of
>processor design could take off. another compromise.
>
>
>
I don't know what you're basing your opinions on, but in the case of
XBIS the representation is byte-oriented. In some cases XBIS will use
fields within a byte for particular purposes (often for flags, sometimes
for short length or handle values), but the byte is still the basic unit
of data.
As for end tag and such... XBIS uses a null byte to indicate the end of
a sequence of attributes or elements, so those are clearly marked. Both
the start and the end of a document are clearly defined in XBIS (unlike
in the text XML representation), so multiple documents can be sent as
part of a single stream. You *could* construct a malformed XBIS encoding
if you wanted to, but in that case the decoder would simply throw an
error - there's no need for "checksums on tag content etc."
- Dennis
--
Dennis M. Sosnoski
Enterprise Java, XML, and Web Services
Training and Consulting
http://www.sosnoski.com
Redmond, WA 425.885.7197
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