Subject: [mmox] Good XML or no XML at all

From: Catherine Pfeffer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 14:02:57 +0100

> Catherine, this is excellent advice that you're giving us about XML, but
the
> underlying hint to "do everything in XML to do it properly" is not a
> worldview that I can subscribe to everywhere, for very practical and
> somewhat insurmountable RL engineering reasons.
>
> Using XML for communication with Limited Capability Clients can easily be
a
> deal breaker in the application domain that we're talking about,  (...)

We fully agree. XML does not fit well into virtual worlds context. Then
don't do XML.

My point was: if you are really to do XML (for whatever obscure reason which
I don't know yet), then, at least, please, do it correctly. Don't just
transpose one-by-one the binary serialization.

When I translate a text from German to French, for example, I don't simply
replace each German word with the equivalent French word. The result would
be terrible ;-).

(And yes, protocols also have a lot of context, just like human languages.
Behind XML there is a lot of paradigms and good practice, it does not just
boil down to a syntax)

Binary serialization goes well on Limited Capacity Clients. OK. Choose this
one.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm a big XML fan. I use XML everyday and partially
make a living out of it. But there are simply cases, like streamed video,
where it is not the right technical choice.

-- 
Cathy