Not An April Fool’s Joke

Just foolishness. The XML Binary Characterization Working Group has issued their final report which recommends (surprise, surprise) that the W3C produce a “Binary XML” specification. Elliotte Rusty Harold nails it. I don’t care if anyone wants to go off and produce their own data interchange format, binary or not, open or not, standardized or not, mapped to XML or not; as long as they don’t call it XML. “Binary XML” is an oxymoron. And I should point out that the people at Sun who are building a binary data format with a mapping to XML are calling it something else entirely. These Binary-XML people are charging headlong onto the top of a very long, very steep, very slippery slope. [Update: Further joy. I see that this poorly-labelled table asserts that XML prevents both “processing efficiency” and “forward compatibility”. Glad to hear it.]