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... notoriously difficult language to learn and particularly, to speak.

Is that so? I would be interested to hear what that assessment is based on - having learned the languages myself, I didn't find it hard, on the contrary.

Chinese is notable for having probably the simplest syntax of any language, pronunciation, this is no harder than are other languages, and the national transcription system, pinyin, is very consistent and accurately represents the pronunciation of the words, unlike for example English - for an illustration, see Mark Twain's famous satire on a similar subject:

http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/1...

Even Chinese characters aren't all that difficult - they are highly structured, and you only need to learn about 1000 to understand most texts; the average desktop user probably already recognises more than that number of icons without even sweating. I think the idea that Chinese is incredibly hard to learn is simply based on ignorance, and perhaps also some sort of fear that one might sound silly if one were to pronounce foreign languages correctly; English speakers seem to go out of their way to mispronounce ALL other languages, including German and French.

Compare Chinese with English:

Chinese: There are no grammatical tenses (past -, present -, future - ...)
English: Verbs have a different form depending on whether it talks about the past, present, etc.

Chinese: Nouns have the same form always. Really always: no singular/plural, nominative/accusative/genitive/dative/...
English: ...

Chinese: Spelled as it is pronounced
English: Need I elaborate?

And in English, the fact that it is a bastard language, with imported features from a large number of other languages, means that the same grammatical structures are governed by several basically unrelated rules: one house, several houses, but on the other hand, one forum, several fora - or should that be forums? And how about 'one virus'? If English were like Chinese, the question simply wouldn't arise. Chinese is easy to learn, far easier than English.

And it isn't that I don't like English - I love the language, but that is exactly because it is so convoluted and almost creatively messy.

You may find this interesting http://www.mantex.co.uk/2009/10/26/spelling-reform/

Sounds like a modest proposal for reducing Internet traffic.

Except ... DJB has more of a point (heh) since svg is usually gzipped as opposed to plain-text smtp (so bandwidth gains are nil). Even for the more general case of xml transferred of http, you have Transfer-Encoding: gzip.

Show me some numbers on how this encoding saves orders of time in parsing and I'll listen. If all it does is encode tags as sequences of bits, it's just performing a weak form of dictionary compression and doesn't help at all with the real issue of data extraction (indexing specific points in the file). However, I can't find any numbers, nor any information whatsoever about the ebxml you describe after five minutes on google (everything points to "electronic business using XML", even along with terms like "wap" and "soap"). So perhaps ebxml isn't the Next Big Thing.

I read through your post and you give absolutely zero reasons why ebxml would be better than regular text-based xml:

1. Instead of the verbose tags and the tedious brackets

   What a minute, you're reading the XML text yourself or generating XML text from a script? You shouldn't do that. You see, generating XML using standard APIs in the "long term will save you from some headaches."

2. Ebxml can be parsed very efficiently (after all xml is nothing but a simple tree representation)

   After all, text-based XML and ebxml are nothing but simple tree representations.

   If you think about what ebxml does (dictionary compression on tags from what you describe), you'll see it saves absolutely no time whatsoever in parsing but merely removes the task of lexing. Lexing (symbol recognition) takes no time at all.

3. If you construct xml using an api rather than output text to some stream (which in the long term will save you from some headaches), ebxml makes no difference at all.

   Except that it's more difficult to "to read, debug and generate from scripts".

If you really want to cut bandwidth, you will note that so much of what we send over the Internet is plain text; therefore, we can ensure that Dave and Virginia go to college if we simply adopt some simple spelling reforms to cut the redundancy of English.

Routers.
Scientology links.
Open protocols.
Free music.
Post-9/11 web responses.
Chat hosts and BBS admins.
Ancient packet switchers.
Executive buzzwords.
Open Source.
Online directories.
Cyber greed.
That guy who just fragged you in Wolfenstein.
The Imperial Domain Droids.
Well-meaning POW/MIA industry dupes.
The Hamster Dance.
Paranoid cartoon fantasy diagrams.
War, damnation and hypertext.
Swedish fiber stations.
Statutory IRC.
Beepstalkers.
Geeks.