Mark Fussell on Binary XML

Mark Fussell, currently working on WSE, let's loose on the W3C work on binary XML.

Mark makes some good points.  A few points of mine:

I realize that you could trivially come up with a binary format that could replace XML, but then you need to get everyone to buyoff on it and ship implementations.  I think the time is better spent on some transport efficiencies like MTOM and GZIP'ed HTTP bodies.

By the way, I don't see anyone screaming for coming up with a binary HTML replacement which is arguably just as inefficient as XML.

And finally, XML is not successful because it is easily read by people...it is successful because it is easy to write code that parses it.  That's why there were so many XML implementations so quickly.  It may seem a lot easier to parse a binary format, but if the engines are already out there to work with what we have, then why are we worried about it.

   -Matt