Nota Bene

I signed this petition in memory of the forgotton holocaust.

It's reported that faster XML is currently under study. Though not a cognoscenti of standards, I think it a classic case of reductio ad absurdum. The motivation to ditch the plain old text format is that a binary format will improve software performance (at the prohibitive expense of potential incompatibilities). However, the most fundamental tenet in computing is that deficiencies in software can always be expiated by advances in hardware. One of my first programs (coded in BASIC) used a loop to add 100 consecutive integers; it took a few minutes to compute the result on my state-of-the-art Apple IIe circa 1984. The same program immediately displayed the answer on a lab Mac IIsi in 1990, completely masking its inferior algorithm (the injudicious use of a costly loop). Therefore, I'm convinced that the Moore's law, not some fancy format, will guide the future of XML.