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XML Quagmire

I've been followoing the issue of XML standards/bifurcation and so on for too long now, but I'm still uncertain about the ramifications of it all.

Comment: Yep, binary is better - faster.

Questions:

• Is this flavor of faster necessarily faster enough to matter?


• Is it better to have mulitple XML-binary formats? Sure, better for each one but...overall?


• Look at the whole Atom vs. RSS/RDF issue. Does XML really want to go down this road?

This sounds like a spanking for the non-ASCII XML folks.

It is, but with a caveat: Remember VRML?

It was brilliant, flexible, easy to code (for a programmer) and in ASCII. And required a plug-in, much like Flash does. XML requires SOME sorta of parser, as well, both not browser native, let's say.

Flash is not easy to code for a programmer (no JS-like code to hack). It's compiled to ... uh, a binary.

I just don't know. I really don't.

But I'm glad to see this XML-thingee starting to (finally!) gain traction with the masses. The next year or so will be interesting in this space.