Dennis Bieber wrote: > Off hand, I'd consider the non-binary nature to be because the > internet protocols are mostly designed for text, not binary.
A document at http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/ lists "the design goals for XML". One of the listed goals is "XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear". To your point, the very _first_ listed goal (if order means anything in this list) is "XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet", so it's reasonable to assume "the non-binary nature to be because the internet protocols are mostly designed for text, not binary." But this assumption turns cause and effect on its head. It is perfectly feasible to pass binary data through every known internet protocol (with a little simplistic encoding), and is done all the time. The real next question is: why ARE the internet protocols "mostly designed for text, not binary"? SMTP, for example, was designed at a time when memory, bandwidth, and CPU cycles were all at a premium, and MTAs were coded using fairly low-level constructs in C where parsing was a pain in the rear. Even so, the developers decided to use relatively free-formatted ASCII in the protocol. To follow your theory to its logical conclusion, they must have wasted all that bandwith, all those CPU cycles, all that memory, all that disk space, and all that effort writing parsing code because of yet another underlying mechanism which was "designed for text." On that account, your theory is correct, but only when you realize the underlying mechanism which is "designed for text" is the human brain, which has to try to make sense of all this mess when things aren't quite interoperating properly. Regards, Pat -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
