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On Thursday 12 September 2002 18:20, W. Hugh Chatfield  I.S.P. wrote:

> So I don't see this as merely an encoding issue... but the ability to act
> upon the encoding in an intelligent fashion.. and within the network
> itself. I don't particularly see why you see this as "wrong".  Maybe I am
> missing something??

If it's really an XSLT accelerator rather than an XML accelerator, then that 
makes more sense. But even then I bet it's just a general purpose chip with 
an XSLT implementation running on it rather than actual specialist hardware!

But my point was that this is a big high level box doing what's meant to be a 
low level, almost invisible to the user, task. It's like selling a "JPEG 
accelerator" that sits as an HTTP proxy and will dynamically rescale or 
recompress the processed images. Potentially useful for sites that have big 
pictures with little thumbnail images of them, but that same hardware would 
be much more useful embedded into something wired into the PCI bus of a 
machine so it could be used by software doing the HTTP proxy thing, as well 
as being usable to speed up the operation of Photoshop and other stuff. 
Indeed, many modern CPUs have hardware that accelerates parts of those 
operations, but this is just a single point in a list of features on the box: 
" - Multimedia acceleration for a richer Internet and games experience!" or 
somesuch.

I see this thing as purely being a product of XML Hype [tm]; somebody said 
"Hmmm, we know how to make hardware, let's try and make some *XML* hardware!"

But I'd be interested to hear if anyone is finding these things useful - one 
never knows!

> Cheers...Hugh

ABS

-- 
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
 - ARP

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