[Xml-bin] Some central design issues

[Stefan Zier]

> That's fine for end users, but computers need standard ways of
> communicating too :-) If interoperable binXML becomes a reality,
> conversion to text will only be necessary when the document is about to be
> examined by a human...

I doubt that binXML is likely to replace textual XML in the majority of
applications. As I mentioned before, IMHO binXML is interesting for
special-purpose applications only where the additional cost of implementing
binXML is justified by savings in some other field (such as bandwidth or CPU
cycles - which aren't really that sparse in many applications) or makes it
feasible to use XML at all.

This has been brought up before, but I think it hasn't been discussed
thoroughly: There is an ISO standard that describes so-called Groves. A
Grove is - basically - a directed graph of nodes with properties. Groves
were originally designed to have a model for data that is represented in
SGML. It also has a kind of Schema language to describe specific data
models.

IMHO, it could be a reasonable approach to think of XML documents as Groves
and try to find a well-designed binary encoding for Groves.

Comments?

---------------------------------------
Stefan Zier
Software Developer
Syntion AG - http://www.syntion.com
Leonrodplatz 2 - 80636 Munich/Germany
Phone +49 89 52 30 45-0
Fax +49 89 52 30 45-20