At 12:44 PM 1/20/2003 Monday, Tyler Close wrote:
>No, but doc-code is just an alternate representation of the XML.
>XML is a standard. There are standards for specifying the
>structure of an XML document. XML also seems to be a more popular
>standard than CORBA. If you're looking to jump on a bandwagon, XML
>seems like the better horse to bet on.

I endorse this perspective. In the modern world, for a system to be widely 
adopted, code must use curly braces and data must use angle brackets. Just 
as E concedes on the curly bracket front (ie, the C-tradition syntax issue) 
in a minimally offensive way, and without conceding on the issues that 
matter; it looks to be me that WOS does likewise on the angle bracket front 
(ie, the XML compatibility issue).

To reiterate, what I need for the next CapTP is a readable textual syntax 
that can honestly claim to be XML compatible without paying the complexity
costs that normally come with such a claim, together with an efficient 
binary syntax which encodes exactly the same meaning. WOS looks like it 
meets these goals well. I've heard the OMG has defined an XML syntax but I 
haven't seen it. David, do you have a URL? For use in CapTP, any comparison 
of CDR to WOS must compare both the binary syntaxes and the XML syntaxes.

Technically, saying "CDR compatible" means something, whereas saying "XML 
compatible" is mostly vacuous[*]. But marketing-wise, the situation is 
reversed. The world has gotten stupid.


[*] Saying "Compatible with XML DTD Foo" would be non-vacuous, but there is 
no standard XML DTD I'm aware of that would be suitable for this purpose. 


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        Cheers,
        --MarkM