Article:		Binary Killed the XML Star?
Subject:		Is it really so bad?
Date:		2003-11-20 02:58:46
From:		Rinie Kervel
If 2 requirements could be fullfilled: - ziplike: encoding to and from binary form is lossless and reproduces exactly the text document - API / conceptual no change in processing (you proces a binary document, but can think of it as the textual XML document) - So for machine processing you get speed and low memory usage. - For human readability/ debugging you use the 'unzip' utility

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• Is it really so bad?
  2003-11-24 01:19:53 James Fuller [Reply]
  
  a few ruminations;

  
  - transmitting xml in a binary format is a type of transport

  
  - saving xml in a binary format is a type of long term storage format

  
  - xml has clearly been defined as text based

  
  - processing a binary structure that contains xml is something fundamentally 'different' then processing xml, and trying to preserve some sort of analog with xml processing is a bit strange and I think a very deep rathole

  
  In any event, most of the requirements linked to 'binary' xml is the need to optimise...early optimisation is a definate antipattern.

  
  The loss in 'human readability' in designing and implementing such binary xml applications will add significant penalties. Lets put our trust that hardware will eventually solve the problem, it always has in the past.

  
  
  
  

• Is it really so bad?
  2003-11-20 22:21:15 Mark Wilcox [Reply]
  
  First -- there's a really good arcticle in XML Developers Journal this month on same topic.

  
  Second -- I think most of this has to do with a valid question -- how to best transmit XML over a network. The overhead of HTTP for SOAP may be a real limation.

  
  ASN.1 is nice for transport because it's very easy to map ASN.1 to XML Schemas (because both do essentially the same thing -- map named values to data types).

  
  I think as things like traditional Web Services grows, we'll eventually see a SOAP stack on the NIC just as we've seen similar optimizations of the TCP stack implementations.

  
  Remember at one time, people didn't want TCP becuase it was too slow. This was one of the ideas of OSI protocol suite.

  
  TCP eventaully one because it was easier and less resource intensive.

  
  I have a feeling XML as text will do the same but ASN.1 will be used for cases where you need the optimizations of binary data transer. Just as we see now on the Net (for example HTTP is all ASCII, LDAP uses ASN.1)
  Mark