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To: tinker84 who wrote (3971)	1/22/2000 10:22:00 PM
From: Badger	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4337

Steve- I'm new here and wondering your take on the status of BWEB and RNWK. Comments on recent relationship and future of each would be appreciated. Thanks. Badger

To: tinker84 who wrote (3971)	1/23/2000 1:03:00 AM
From: MrBuzz	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4337

XML's ability to present itself in human readable format (as opposed to binary representation) is not a revolutionary thing. Not much more different than a C/C++ header file being passed over the net waiting for interpretation. I agree with the flexibility comment, as it is a "do what you want with it" attitude. But there are some things to consider. XML may have "self describing" tags, but there still has to be sufficient understanding between the parties who choose to use that as their negotiation means. Doesn't this require documentation of the meaning of the constructs so that the humans can interpret it in the first place? And, also the parsing applications to go out and assemble the constructs in binary structures to be stored on the backend, let alone in cache/memory? Sounds like another even more slower translation process to me. And why in the world would you want to expose your internal data representations to the entire world? I'm sure encrypted XML is in the works, but doesnt that just add yet another slow process to the already slow tokenized text processing (as opposed to binary packed structures). XML's ability to be quickly processed is due to hardware innovations, capable of doing fast text processing. Is this a who came first, the chicken or the egg situation? Seems like the world should have represented everything in text format all along.... An <employee> tag means different things to different parties. Its the provider that decides on its meaning. And there lies the problem - someone has to set the standard on the meaning and play god. Self descriptive documents are fine but in a world of proprietary, intellectual property, and competiveness, setting the standard to the meaning of tags is a slow, political, and often times wasteful effort. Rather than working the solution to a generalized object description, XML allows companies to put the standardization effort on hold and let them do anything they darn well please. Coming up with standardized business object descriptions are far more important in this stage of software evolution than self describing documents. Just because something is represented in text format and bracketed with greater/less than characters doesn't make it "revolutionary". XML is a means to represent data. No different than me bringing up my Windows Notepad editor and typiing stuff in and letting you interpret it. MrBuzz www.whats-the-buzz.com