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W3C launches Binary XML Packaging
Spy der Mann writes "Remember the recent discussion on Binary XML? Well, there's news. The W3C just released the specs for XML-binary optimized packaging (XOP). In summary, they take binary data out of the XML, and put it in a separate section using MIME-Multipart. You can read the press release and the testimonials from MS, IBM and BEA."
The way I see it, XML's only benefit over something like SQL is that it -is- plain text and easily user modifiable. Binary XML seems to me more like a step backwards than a step fowards. Of course, I've never understood the buzzwordiness of XML anyway. Things like SOAP make it seem like a protocol when it's a format. I think that the W3C should be spending their time on XML implimentations like SVG, MathML and XHTML, not on things like this.
My Systems
Reading the newest raft of W3C standards, complete with examples showing the increases in message size and total complexity at each step, I feel as if I have FINALLY understood how UK-style socialism works. And why the US is in Iraq. And why the tax code is 250,000 pages long, and why New Coke was created, and why there are people who will genuinely refuse to read a document if contains a diagram that is not in the most recent version of UML.
It's all a product of the same kind of thinking.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.