As a software developer I find this particularly good.

While I myself would prefer to write a binary protocol and send the data through a TCP socket I can no longer do that.

When we land big contracts at work that deal in government and health the key thing they need now is interoperability with others. What does this mean? XML. Whether or not you like it, XML is here to stay. Its what everyone is pushing.

Therefore we had to adapt and start using it. Not just for B2B, our rich desktop clients now communicate with the server using XML web services.

The problem we've encountered is sending binary data. Right now we have to encode the data in base64 XML which uses lots of resources. I will give more look at this but it looks particularly good.

The tech industry seems really starved for ideas lately.

Binary file formats are hard.
Let's use XML because it's easier.
No wait... let's represent that XML in a more efficeint binary format.
Ah yeah that's the ticket - the best of both worlds!

Now let me just fire up my code-morphing processor which, through emulation ahieves x86 compatibility with "low" power consumption. Never mind it's slower overall and has worse MIPS/mW than an underclocked x86 - look Ma, we *inveted* something!!!!

There are some real technical problems out there... why are people chasing non-problems like XML?

The way I see it, XML's only benefit over something like SQL is that it -is- plain text and easily user modifiable. Binary XML seems to me more like a step backwards than a step fowards. Of course, I've never understood the buzzwordiness of XML anyway. Things like SOAP make it seem like a protocol when it's a format. I think that the W3C should be spending their time on XML implimentations like SVG, MathML and XHTML, not on things like this.

Web services apps need effective, standard methods for handling binary data - this is good news.