Article:		Binary XML, Again
Subject:		You're 3/4 right
Date:		2003-08-14 12:47:34
From:		Kendall Clark
Response to: You're 3/4 right
--You're obviously a bright guy. How can you be so clueless to not see the value of compressing rich and complex data sets? The world contains far more than text. Gzip compression is simply not adequate for reducing the size of, say, 3D data. Take a look at what we're doing with X3D and you'll see that gzip will never be a satisfactory solution.-- Hehe; any time someone starts out by saying nice things about you, you know the hammer is about to fall; and Tony wields it deftly here. Let me say, Tony, that I do not take a position on the technical feasability of domain-specific compression schemes. You shouldn't, I think, assume from that absence that I dispute that feasability. My point was that for a *general case* compression scheme, for the bulk of the extant XML, gzip is hard to beat, especially when you take ubiquity factors into account. I only care about the general case in the context of a W3C standard because, as I said clearly, domain specific compression schemes ought not be the business of W3C standards, at least that's my view (one which probably isn't shared by the W3C staff and leadership insofar as fees-paying vendors want a special-case W3C-blessed binary variant of XML). Hey, this X3D stuff sounds neat. I just happen to think that if X3D vendors want a domain-specific compression scheme for their XML data, bully for them, but that shouldn't come under the auspices of the W3C (for a variety of reasons); or, if it does, it's got nothing to do with this announced workshop (which seems to be taking the general case as its target). Thanks for responding.

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• You're 3/4 right
  2003-08-14 16:02:55 Tony Parisi