Is XML getting too hard?

[David Megginson]

Jon Knight writes:

 > Does a *.jar file imply that XML is getting tightly bound to Java?
 > What about people wanting to use other programming language with
 > XML?  Surely XML's architecture should be independent of the
 > programming languages used to implement its tools?

Peter was using *.jar by way of casual example, not precept.  In fact,
since jar is based on zip, it is unsuitable for this sort of work (the
whole file has to be read before any can be processed).  A streaming
protocol similar to tar or cpio is the only reasonable alternative for
packaging, since an application can start working with the contents
before the whole archive has been downloaded.

Note also that packaging does not concern only XML entities -- there's
also the problem of bundling non-XML entities, such as vector and
raster graphics, audio and video clips, VRML worlds, etc., that are
referenced from within an XML document.

In the end, then, this is a problem that we have to solve anyway.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david at megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev at ic.ac.uk
Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/
To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
(un)subscribe xml-dev
To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo at ic.ac.uk the following message;
subscribe xml-dev-digest
List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa at ic.ac.uk)