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> FWIW, the show-stopper argument in a number of discussions at XML 2004
> that I heard against the idea that "XML text is ubiquitous, don't mess
> with it" was from the wireless people: XML is NOT ubiquitous in our
> world, because of the excessive bandwidth requirements. Our technical
> constraints are fundamental and not going away anytime soon, so don't
> expect Moore's Law to make everything alright the way it has made
> convenient but inefficient approaches work on the desktop and on the
> server.
With a statement like that you seriously devalue the signal mismatch
problems using XML has solved for a GREAT MANY situations. I suspect that's
not your intent.
That it may require a degree of syntax beyond that of ultra-sparse textual
or binary doesn't address all aspects of "efficiency". That a document can
be /read/ by the end-developer is orders of magnitude more efficient than
some brittle format mired in obscurity. So please, don't fling complaints
about efficiencies when you've only your situation to consider. A great
many of us are quite willing to recognize the value gained by using
descriptive markup.
> In other words, it's time to experiment, to
> develop specs that meet the needs of some specific industry, to see if
> parsing and compression technology for XML text can be dramatically
> improved .... and THEN to come back with data and best practices in
> hand to see if W3C Recommendations can be agreed upon.
Can't argue with that as an idea. In practice, however, wireless carriers
have been notoriously bad at considering anything even slightly beyond their
own greed and self-interest. It's certainly a chicken-egg situation and
without more effective cooperation from the carriers it's going to stay that
way.
-Bill Kearney
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