Article:		Binary XML, Again
Subject:		Too many words
Date:		2003-08-14 12:39:37
From:		Kendall Clark
Response to: Too many words
I'm not sure what counts as an "idea" for you, but I'll try to do better next time. (And if you think this piece is wordy, you should have seen it before Edd cut it down a bit. So I'm probably guilty as charged there, too.) However, I fail to see what is "ridiculous" about asking for empirical data to back up performance claims about binary variants of XML. Frankly, I think that's just the bare minimum of doing good research and engineering. As for whether I "demanded" data, I'll let other, perhaps more charitable readers decide. (Which, of course, all begs the question: so what if I *did* "demand" data...Performance claims without some empirical grounds are pretty meaningless, as just about everyone outside the Marketing Department concedes.)

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• Too many words (Kendall has a hammer of his own)
  2003-08-15 13:01:23 jonnie savell [Reply]
  
  Rather than defining idea, let us define fluff (the absence of idea): "I dissent from several points of XML Orthodoxy because I am by nature, personal inclination, and experience, a dissident ..." Several spots of fluff I think. Too many words I think (and I fear that I have added too many of my own).

  
  OK, I got busted for the having made the charge that the demand was ridiculous. "Frankly, I think that's just the bare minimum of doing good research and engineering." Right you are. I was hoping that you would do some of it. I will back off because I have to some good research of my own.

  
  I get this eery feeling that this discussion risks missing a lot of territory if it continues to focus exclusively on document wide compression schemes.

  
  I like the xsi:type attribute. I think that the schema folks ought to add some built-in primitive types to their collection. I might like to strip from my application any "to string" conversion because I just don't enjoy converting well defined data types to strings. I might not mind converting my language specific data type format to a language neutral data type format, however. Hey, look at me (and stop laughing):
  ...
  <balance xsi:type="xsd:big_int">... unreadable stuff ...</balance>
  ...

  
  I avoided converting my data types to strings. I would understand if you felt that I made too big a fuss about this. I too might like more. I would like to tell the validating parser "Hey, ignore the next 16K of data following my <big_data> element. Just make sure that there is a </big_data> tag following the 16K of stuff and that everything is valid after that.

  
  So, is this pure noise, or is there some signal?