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Mike Champion wrote: > I would totally agree that either > calling an alternative "XML" without qualification would be stupid, but > presumably this is a problem that HTTP content negotiation could handle > easily if someone offered an alternative *standardized* "XML" serialization > on their website. And does. A specification I worked on recently uses SOAP, and mandates the HTTP binding with content-negotiation (I wish the official SOAP HTTP binding would do that as well...). They wished to transmit binary infosets optionally, and mandated XML for interoperability. This is not a closed system, on the contrary it's a very open one. Selecting between either option is a trivial matter of setting the correct Accept-Encoding/Content-Encoding, and it has shown to work very smoothly. > I see several scenarios for the future: One is that the alternatives become > moot -- Office 11 makes XML GUI authoring ubiquitous, and Moore's Law makes > the bandwidth and performance issues associated with the XML 1.x syntax > trivial. That could very well happen eventually, but unfortunately, barring a revolution it won't be the case before at least a few years. > Two is to legitimize the infoset- centric view of "XML" and have a > manageable number of alternative syntaxes (with MIME registrations, etc. etc. > to keep the Web sane). Three is that people take option 2 without the > blessing of the W3C, simply because they can't afford the overhead of the > unicode tags, etc. in their constrained or high-performance environments, and > we have real chaos. 2003 is to see several consortia start ratifying binary infosets, some of them might end up being home-grown. This wasn't obvious to me before I started delving into the topic, but I'm seriously concerned that chaos isn't very far away. > People here seem to believe that Gates and Moore will save our butts :-) > That's not the impression I get on web services-oriented and > middleware-oriented developers, but I don't have enough first hand knowledge > to judge. It's not the impression I get from mobile, broadcast, and embedded orientated developers either. -- Robin Berjon <robin.berjon@e...> Research Engineer, Expway 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
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