Article:		Binary Killed the XML Star?
Subject:		I'm not an "antitextualist..." I'm "encoding-neutral."
Date:		2003-11-20 09:21:22
From:		Bob Wyman
Grumble... I really don't like the implication that I'm an "anti-textualist." The reality is that I spend all day, every day, working on XML based systems and see great value in XML. On the other hand, my systems are "encoding independent" so they work just as well with binary encodings as they do with XML. Thus, I'd rather be characterized as "encoding neutral"... My pushing for binary is so that I have the choice available when it makes sense -- often, binary encodings don't make sense... Kendall, thanks for taking the time to summarize the continuing discussions re SAX and ASN.1 defined binary encodings. You've done a good job, however, I do wish that you had been able to record some of the consensus on issues that appears to have been generated from the discussion. Most important is the fact that it has been established that ASN.1 encodings can interchange transparently with SAX2 based systems, without API extensions, in both "no-schema" and "shared schema" environments. Thus, from a programmers point of view, as long as they access their data streams via SAX2 or a similar API, they have no need to care whether they are working with textual XML or the same content encoded using an ASN.1 defined binary encoding. bob wyman

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