Note: This charter has been modified on June 15, 2004. The Patent Policy section has been replaced by a Patent Disclosures section.
XML has been enormously successful as a markup language for documents and data; it enjoys wide support and deployment in a variety of programming languages, computing platforms, applications and specifications. In part, this is because it provides a single means of marking up data that isn't specific to any one application domain. This has encouraged the development of a number of generic tools (e.g., parsers, generators, APIs, validators, etc.) and standards (e.g., XPath, XML Schema, XML Query, etc.).
However, XML 1.x may not be the optimal format for all purposes. There are cases where the overhead of generating, parsing, transmitting, storing, or accessing XML-based data may be deemed too great for a particular application. As a result, some use cases' requirements may not be met by XML 1.x. There are a number of existing binary interchange mechanisms and formats that are used to address some or all of these needs.
The XML Binary Characterization Working Group is tasked with gathering information that will help determine the nature of these use cases, characterizing the properties that XML provides as well as those that are required by the use cases, and establishing objective, shared measurements to help judge whether XML 1.x and alternate (binary) encodings provide the required properties.
It is expected that the Working Group's products will be used to inform discussion about alternate encodings of XML 1.x. If the Working Group is able to agree on a set of properties that meets the requirements of those Use Cases deemed in-scope, it may use the Measurements Document to perform characterizations of various candidate technologies to ascertain that creating a serialization of XML with those properties is technically feasible.
The Working Group may be unable to agree upon a common set of properties that meets the requirements of those use cases deemed in-scope, or may be unable to identify any candidate technology that meets the stated these requirements. Additionally, the Working Group may determine that the benefits brought by an alternate encoding of XML may not be sufficient to justify the loss of interoperability incurred.
If the Working Group successfully identifies at least one candidate in this manner, it may suggest a charter for further work in this area.
The XML Binary Characterization WG has the following deliverables:
The Properties document will determine the relevant properties of XML 1.x to provide a common understanding of the desirable characteristics of an alternate encoding, and the appropriate aspects to measure in candidate solutions. For example, the property of ordered children is often (but not always) significant, so that paragraphs in a transmitted XHTML document must be received in the correct order, but rows in a relational database dump might not have such a constraint, even when represented in XML.
The Properties document is expected to be published as a Working Group Note.
The Use Cases document will record relevant use cases to understand how XML 1.x is currently used, and what optimizations over XML 1.x are desirable and necessary. Each use case will be characterized in an agreed-upon format that identifies each of the relevant properties that apply, or may be sacrificed, to satisfy the use case.
The Use Cases document is expected to be published as a Working Group Note.
The Measurements document will establish shared measurement methods for each property defined in the Properties document to help evaluate aspects of both XML and alternate encodings. It will be accompanied by a test corpus that will provide shared data on which to perform the measurements that it describes. The Measurements document should also include a template that can be used to characterize the measurements of an encoding candidate.
The Measurements document is expected to be published as a Working Group Note.
If the Working Group is able to agree upon a common set of properties that meet the requirements of the use cases deemed in-scope, it may record them in the Characterizations document and perform characterizations of candidate technologies submitted to the Working Group.
If the Working Group is able to identify at least one technology through characterization of an implementation with the measurements in the Measurements document, it may choose to suggest a charter for further work in this area.
These are subject to revision due to editorial needs and external scheduling issues;
updates will be negotiated with the related groups and
recorded on the XML Binary Characterization Working Group home page.
Meeting dates are mentioned here for planning purposes.
In order to keep to a schedule, it should be noted that the Working Group
Chair has the authority to rule issues out of scope or to shelve
them as necessary,
The expected duration of the Working Group is 1 year, through 31 March 2005.
XML and XML-derived activities have become a strategic technology in W3C and elsewhere. Each deliverable of any Working Group must satisfy the dependencies from other W3C Working Groups before it can advance to Candidate Recommendation.
The XML Binary Characterization Working Group should liaise with at least the following groups outside W3C:
Each participant should expect to spend one day per week on work for this Working Group, although the time commitment for the chair and editors may be higher.
In addition to the time commitment noted above, each participant of the WG may be expected to show evidence to the chairs of active work in the general topic area.
To join the XML Binary Characterization Working Group, please follow the instructions on the Working Group home page.
The Working Group will have a group home page that records the history of the group, provides access to the archives, meeting minutes, task list and current documents, participants list, and other relevant documents and resources. It will be maintained by W3C Team contact in collaboration with the Chair.
The Working Group also has a public Home Page, maintained by the W3C Team contact in collaboration with the Chair.
Minutes of Working Group meetings shall be made available to members of the Working Group and archived in a location accessible to the W3C membership. The Chair will decide which issues, if any, are not made public.
Face-to-face meetings will be held as needed; it is expected that such meetings will be held about every two to three months.
The working group will use a member-only mailing list for technical communication, supplemented by a public list that may, at the discretion of the chair, be directed to discuss specific topics.
To be successful, we expect the Working Group to have approximately 15 to 20 active participants. A large public review group that will participate in the mailing list discussions is expected.
The XML Binary Characterization Working Group will initially be chaired by Robin Berjon of Expway. The initial W3C Team contacts are Carine Bournez and Liam Quin.
The W3C Team is responsible for the mailing lists, for the public Working Group pages, and for liaison with the W3C Communications Team for the publication of working drafts. W3C Team members are expected to adopt the same requirements for meeting attendance, timely response, and information disclosure as are required of W3C Members. This WG is expected to need approximately 35% of the time of one Team member.
The XML Binary Characterization Working Group provides an opportunity to share perspectives on XML Binary Characterization in general. W3C reminds Working Group participants of their obligation to comply with patent disclosure obligations as set out in Section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy. While the Working Group does not produce Recommendation-track documents, when Working Group participants review Recommendation-track specifications from other Working Groups, the patent disclosure obligations do apply.
Last Modified: $Date: 2004/06/15 17:43:56 $