This may be opening up a can of worms but I have been puzzled why some folks in the XML world get a bit uncomfortable when folks start pushing a binary format. I am beginning to realize that perhaps it is because at that point, it really isn't XML anymore, at least not in the XML 1.0 sense of "document/markup language".
I notice Don Box and others (including Henk) emphasizing Infoset, Context and Types as being the essence of XML. OK, so once you start talking about a binary wire format for this, you lose the whole notion of "document" and "Markup Language (the ML in XML)". To call that binary format a form of XML is an abuse the name eXtensible *Markup Language*. Frankly, I have never found the "document/markup language" factor of XML all that appealing anyway especially when I am happy working with types in .NET and just want to exchange these types with other systems. I am a programmer and I am much more comfortable with programming constructs than document formats. Working with XML tags, namespaces, elements and attributes is rather tedious and not particularly interesting. I thought WYSIWYG in the '80s was a marvelous step forward. In this regard, the DOM approach to dealing with infosets is at least palatable. OK, so I will admit that it is handy if you are saving data to file that you can open that file in a text editor and view it. But that doesn't seem like the common use case to me, yet it seems like that is what XML was optimized for. Perhaps this speaks to the schism of the "document" oriented folks for which XML is a fine "document" technology and the "developers" who are looking for a replacement for EDX and with SOAP a replacement for RPC. I am much more interested in the latter case. I would like to see a universal type system that can be marshaled between multiple OS architectures and development platforms (Java/.NET). It should be able to maintain all the benefit of structured data (infoset), namespaces (context) and a universal type system (schemas). In this scenario I don't care to ever see a set of "<>". -- Keith -----Original Message----- From: Henk de Koning [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, May 31, 2002 7:45 AM Subject: Re: Advice XML is the answer to world hunger and piece. It's the compilation of all modern computer science. It is a silver bullet. Plus, it does damn good on your CV. It will get you the partner you you never dared to call. And it is yet an extra bullet on your feature list. Also, XML adds structure (infoset), context (namespaces) and type (schemas) to your information. In addition, it has a slow, hard to read, but well-accepted serialization format (XML 1.0) -- in addition to whatever serialization you want to define yourself. Largely SQL Server is about storing and retrieving structured (although relational instead of hierarchical) and typed information. The thing is that the SQL Server serialization format on the wire (TDS) is not nearly as well-accepted as XML is. You don't want to force all machines talking to your web service to talk TDS (or maybe you do, but you can't pull it ;-). -- Henkk You can read messages from the DOTNET archive, unsubscribe from DOTNET, or subscribe to other DevelopMentor lists at http://discuss.develop.com.
