Is it time for the binary XML permathread to start up again?

[Michael Champion <mc@xegesis.org>]

http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-exi-20070716/ has been published; now it's time for the rest of the world to take a look at what W3C has come up with and evaluate whether it meets a real world need.  Elliotte Harold http://www.cafeconleche.org/oldnews/news2007July18.html has the only post I have seen so far that expressed an opinion: "The Efficient XML Interchange Format is neither efficient nor XML nor interchangeable."

 

I'm particularly interested in thoughts on what the WG came up with in the light of the TAG opinion http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-xml-binary/2005May/0000.html .  Specifically, how much of a performance / compresison gain would it take to outweight the disruptive effects the TAG noted? It would be interesting to have that discussion before the EXI WG publishes their report on how much actual improvement they see for which scenarios.

 

For the record, Microsoft has expressed considerable skepticism that a single efficient XML format could cover enough use cases with sufficient improvement to justify a W3C Recommendation, but we are waiting for the hard evidence.