Re: [xml] WBXML -- "Binary XML"

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2003 at 08:15:08PM -0400, Liam R. E. Quin wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-10-14 at 17:55, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> >   Sorry, I very reluctant toward "Binary XML" in general
> [...]
>
> We (W3C) just held a workshop on the subject of binary interchange of
> XML Information Set Items... the results will be public at the end
> of October.
>
> I think it is fair to say there is no consensus right now on a single
> binary format, but, if there is a consensus, it's that it's not WAP :-)

  Right, though the use case suggested might be very different:
    "in-memory tree format can be saved to disk as a chunk"
it seems to me that this doesn't necessary requires any interchange,
but rather a way to avoid processing costs. Libxml2 has no database
back-end, that mean the data must be kept in memory or is purely
volatile. 
  Hard to tell what is really at stake, hence my request to get direct
feedback here, I will of course read your conclusions from the workshop :-)
But some of the use cases like avoiding to reparse a large document 
to extract a fragment or being able to process documents as tree even
if they don't fit in the virtual memory are IMHO better solved by ways to
plug a database back-end than by trying to serialize a binary result.
Of course it's all a matter of perspective, a database table and indexes
are binaries entities, but they are not XML, and from a libxml2 
perspective it becomes an API problem, not a format one, which I 
feel quite more comfortable with.

  Yours,

Daniel

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