XML News from Friday, February 25, 2005

The W3C XML Binary Characterization Working Group (a bit of an Orwellian name, that. The one thing that's guaranteed about this effort is that the format it produces will not be XML.) has published the first public working draft of XML Binary Characterization Measurement Methodologies. "This document describes measurement aspects, methods, caveats, test data, and test scenarios for evaluating the potential benefits of an alternate serialization for XML. This document relies on the XML Binary Characterization Working Group (XBC WG) documents for Use Cases and Properties. The focus of this document is to provide a basis for later comparison rather than reporting of actual measurements of actual implementations. The examined and potential use cases represent existing uses that might benefit from the use of an XML-like format, if it had certain additional properties. This potential expansion of the XML community depends on the existence, identification, and evolution of solutions that cover the broadest problem footprint in the best fashion. The XBC WG Characterization document represents the working group's consensus of required and useful properties. This document discusses how fulfillment of those properties can be precisely evaluated and how combinations of properties are best compared."

The W3C XML Binary Characterization Working Group has also updated the working drafts of XML Binary Characterization Use Cases and XML Binary Characterization Properties. The use cases document describes 18 different scenarios where a so-called binary XML format might be desirable. I don't find most of these at all convincing. They tend to divide into scenarios that can operate just fine with traditional XML (FIXML) and scenarios that shouldn't be going anywhere near anything the even smells of XML (Floating Point Arrays in the Energy Industry, Supercomputing and Grid Processing). Have we all forgotten the Edsel?

The properties document is more theoretical, and discusses the different characteristics XML has and that a non-XML binary format might or should have. These properties include:

The Mozilla Project has released Firefox 1.0.1, the open source web browser that is rapidly gaining on Internet Explorer. Firefox supports HTML, XHTML, CSS, and XSLT. MathML and SVG aren't supported out of the box, but can be added. This is a bug fix release that includes several security fixes. Among them, non-ASCII characters domain names are now displayed in an encoded ASCII format rather than using Unicode. This should make phishing attempts based on domain names like www.раУраІ.com more obvious. All users should upgrade.

The Software Development 2005 Expo in Santa Clara next month (March 14-18) is looking for a few more volunteers to man doors, distribute notes, and similar tasks. For each day a you volunteer you get to attend the conference for a day free, and most volunteer days involve nothing more strenuous than sitting in the back of the room listening to the presentation, and collecting eval forms at the end; so really, it's a nice way to attend the show for free.