Alternatives to browsers (was Re: Alternatives to the W3C)

[Didier PH Martin]

Hi Sabin,

Sabin said:
Remember that my original question was, 'Why is _application_
specific_ markup preferable to an _application_specific_ binary
wire protocol'.

XML encoding gets you a common generic format, but it doesn't
get you semantic transparency. So, sure, you'd be able to
parse the contents of XML rpc packets, but that doesn't mean
you'll be able to do anything interesting with them.

Didier replies:
Off course not in all cases. But, the fact that on some occasions you can
communicate with an object from something which is not an object (i.e. with
a browser) and that you can get the content of a message displayable can
indeed be useful. So, to use XML as a marshaling format, you gain more
versatility but you gained this with an increased usage of the bandwidth if
the transmission is in a compressed format. So, the best configuration seems
to be xml in compressed format over HTTP as a marshaling format. So, overall
it can be made better than strict binary marshaling.


Cheers
Didier PH Martin
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