Story: Google: OOXML 'insufficient and unnecessary'

Posted by: Anonymous123 (Wednesday 27 February 2008, 6:21 PM)

XML in spirit isn't going to be as efficient as binary

Whoa! Albert, XML by nature is not going to be as efficient as a binary encoding, assuming you follow the spirit of XML. Sure you can do a base64 dump of binary and stick tags around it for example, but that isn't really XML's intention. I've written an XML/object translation library and I know of what I speak.

So what are they doing to "speed up" large spreadsheet loading and saving, or anything else? Tags are tags, and the encoding/decoding needs to write/interpret them. The only way to speed up XML interpretation is to get rid of tags by encoding multiple pieces of information for a particular tag. That introduces portability problems for obvious reasons and defies the intent of XML.

By the way, the controversy over extending things never stopped Microsoft in the past. Again, remember Java?

Lastly, how would it mean downgrading MS Office? If they want speed, use binary. If they want portability, use XML. Those two really don't mix. It's a trade-off. Do both. Doing "performance enhancements" in OOXML, which I suspect is tag-glomming, is NOT proper XML.

View complete profile

Private message disabled

View all posts