Rick Jelliffe is a good bloke, don't get me wrong. However, I couldn't agree with his latest post about binary XML. I have written a long comment there, which I encourage you to read.
What I think we all can agree on is that most XML users don't need compressed XML most of the time. Unfortunately, some people, including those in positions of authority at the W3C and other places, seem to have interpreted this as meaning that there is no need for a standard binary compression for XML. I have needed exactly this compression for years now in my work in finance, where the data volumes involved are simply more than the available network bandwidth can support. Everyone used to think that network bandwidth was growing so quickly that the need for compression would quickly disappear, but that hasn't happened in the real world. Even if the main network pipe to a company's door is now bigger, that doesn't mean the internal pipes between their sites have kept up.
For years, people have asked me what would be the next big thing that replaces XML. My answer is that there isn't one - XML is as fundamental as TCP/IP or Ethernet, and nobody asks me what are going to replace these. Nobody particularly wants to replace them, for the most part (except we need IPv6 to get more IP addresses). However, if there is something that could drive people to produce a replacement for XML, it would be big enterprises getting together to come up with a format that can make better use of the available network bandwidth for the huge volumes of data that they would like to be able to move around. It will be a real shame if this happens, since a standard binary XML compression would satisfy this need, and still allow everyone to use the same rich set of tools we already have for XML. The people who need binary XML are a minority, but they are a powerful and important minority, which is something we shouldn't be ignoring.
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