Re: [xml-dev] No XML Binaries? Buy Hardware

[Robin Berjon <robin@joost.com>]

On Feb 23, 2007, at 13:33, Elliotte Harold wrote:
> Robin Berjon wrote:
>> Never ascribe to malice yadda yadda.
>
> It's not malice so much as mysteriousness. Often what we can't see  
> and don't understand seems more significant than what we can. Is a  
> magic show as much fun if you know how all the tricks are done?
>
> When you pull back the curtain and see how little is really going  
> on, you're often a lot less impressed than when you didn't  
> understand what is going on. That's as true in technology as magic.  
> Both are the art of making seemingly complex things happen through  
> relatively simple trickery.

Right, but that's pretty much my point: these people don't see XML as  
being any less mysterious than a binary version of it. You load it in  
a text editor and you see a bunch of pointy things. It's all "stuff  
on the wire", things that "you don't see in the IDE", and "I made  
this pretty tree in my XML editor, why should I care how it's saved?  
I don't look inside HTML page any more than I look inside Word  
documents".

That segment of the industry (and I don't think that it's small) will  
not be convinced not to misuse binary XML with arguments against it,  
but with clear arguments about the supremacy of text. I honestly  
can't count the number of times that I had to go through that routine.

--
Robin Berjon
........................................................................
Monsters — all teeth and digestive tract, no brains at all.
                         -- Calvin & Hobbes