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Michael Champion wrote:
> 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. On othe other hand, we desperately want the tools and
> standardization that XML offers, just not that verbose serialization.
> We could write a standard for our industry, but we want *one*
> internet, not a wired one and a wireless one."
Yes, that is also the argument they (we, I guess I should say) made at
the binary workshop, and for quite a few of them had been making already
for some years before that.
I fully understand the way in which XML as a ubiquitous format is more
than extremely valuable, and consequently highly valued. But on the
other hand it only flies for a constrained, localized, and qualified
definition of ubiquity. To make a deliberately exagerated (and unfair)
comparison, some people see XML as ubiquitous and won't hear of anything
else in the same way that some people see Win32 as ubiquitous and don't
see the point in targeting other platforms. The point is, who's ubiquity
are you talking about? Let me illustrate with a fresh quote from Russell
Beattie's blog:
"The thing I have to constantly impress on people who are just getting
up to speed in the mobile space is the numbers involved. The hundreds of
millions of devices shipped just this year alone by just Nokia, the
billions of subscribers out there, the massive growth that's going to
happen over the next few years. Many companies just can't imagine this
sort of scale. Apple shipped 4 million iPods in the past quarter, Palm
shipped 1.5 million Treos and Dell shipped 8 million PCs and 185k Axims.
Very nice, but Nokia shipped over 50 million handsets in the same
timeframe. See what I'm talking about?"
Mobiles do use XML -- just look at how SVG has stormed over that world
-- but nowhere near as much as they could if it didn't chop off half the
battery's life each time you parsed a little too long :)
In light of the above numbers, the question is "would binary XML hurt
XML's ubiquity, or would it take it to another level entirely?" We could
after all well be, sooner rather than later, talking about an order of
magnitude difference.
> I doubt it too. I think people have accepted that there is a problem,
> but there is intense skepticism that a single standard format will
> cover all (or even 80%) of the requirements.
Skepticism, or at least some form of aporia, is also present in the XBC
WG. We are almost done with the "destructive" phase of collecting use
cases and properties, which naturally easily leaves one with the
impression that it's just too big. But then that was the intention to
start with, and we're now starting to look at removing the dog's
breakfast from the mix and seeing if there isn't a sufficiently large
subset that would justify a standard. More on that in the coming months.
> One data point that some
> people from Microsoft brought up in the Binary XML Town Hall: They
> have *tried* to come up with one binary serialization that will
> satisfy even their internal customers, and haven't found one.
Yes, they said that at the workshop too. But that needs to be qualified:
it's quite possible that there's no good option that can cover for
instance both efficient transmission between MSSQL client and server,
and compilation of XAML documents to an intermediate format, but those
are fairly specific. Also, while I know for a fact that Microsoft has
top-notch engineers at its disposal it's happened before that they've
shipped less-than-average products or failed to find the right solution
to something.
> There is
> also EXTREME skepticism that a typical W3C design by committee job
> will come up with anything useful.
I don't think that's fair. The W3C's had failures and successes -- and
anyone who thinks any organisation will get things right every single
time is obviously on crack. I think that a critical mass of people is
now aware of pitfalls they might not have thought of before. To put it
differently, most people on the XBC WG have used XML Schema, and a fair
number have actually implemented it ;)
> The sense I got from Michael Leventhal's presentation on the XBC was
> that you are doing the Right Thing. I didn't hear anyone in the
> audience disagree that this is a very valuable exercise, even if many
> are convinced that it will ultimately conclude that the
> (non-wireless?) world is not ready for a single binary XML standard.
> Most of us would be extremely happy to be proven wrong on that point,
> if the data are there to back it up.
Well if someone went ahead and produced a mobile-specific standard, it's
what the desktop minority will end up using a couple years down the
line, simply because that's where the center of gravity is. I'd line
that up as a pretty good reason that *if* a new standard is to be
created for binary XML, it certainly can't be mobile-specific.
> I ended my talk with a *personal* [don't hold any past, present, or
> future employer responsible!] recommendation "Leave evolution to
> Darwin, not Berners-Lee". 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.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, except that your timeline is
off by about 4-5 years :) We've got the industry-specific standards,
we've got the more generic standards, we've got deployment experience --
in some cases we're talking millions of terminals. The XBC WG is just us
guys coming back with the data and best practices in hand to see if W3C
Recommendations can be agreed upon.
For sure there's always room for innovation in the space, but we're way
past the point where it's experimental. In fact, it's been quite a while
since I last saw something that caught my attention as truly innovative
in the field. The question now is really about if we want one W3C
standard for all -- at the cost of having possibly two universal formats
instead of one -- or do we want XML and the three or four binary XML
standards (from other groups) that'll survive market competition?
--
Robin Berjon
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