I am reading (some of) these passionate exchanges and
I have a hard time getting passionate myself one
way or the other.
It seems one side thinks the main seeling point is
the capability to store/stream structured text,
while the other side wants to use the same principal
mechanisms for data.
Well, text is just a (very portable) way of encoding
data. On the other hand, why not use similar mechanisms
for storing/streaming data with other encodings?
Yes, XML/SAX is about text, but one can abstract out
the more general concepts and apply them differently.
Maybe its just a turf war about names.
Why not call it BinSAX then, or similar?
If I send "7" or "007" or one byte as 00000111 or
a 32 bit big endian integer, the recipient has to
make sense of it, hopefully in a way that relates
to the underlying data. And let's not get confused
by encoding artifacts that may or may not be meaningful,
depending on what we communicate about. "7" = "007",
or maybe not.
Karl
