Why I Hate Palmtops (was: Re: SGML, XML and SML)

[Mark Baker]

At 09:42 AM 11/25/99 +0100, Paul Prescod wrote:
>Cell phones must increasingly deal with structured information.
>Therefore cell phones need to deal with XML.

Agreed, but that doesn't answer the question of "Why XML?".  Why not ASN.1,
SGML, SML, or a non-standard binary encoded XML that might be more suitable
over small pipes?  The proxy on the last-hop to the cell phone can take
care of bidirectional conversion, right?

IMHO, that answer only arrives once you realize that this structured
information isn't restricted to travelling the client/server path and
always going through that proxy.  What if I want to send a web page or
vCard or whatever to another cell phone via IR or Bluetooth, where there's
no proxy available?  That's where a well-deployed standard matters, and
*that's* "Why XML?".

MB

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