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Comment on WBXML Submission

W3C is pleased to receive the WBXML submission from Ericsson, IBM, Motorola, and Phone.com.

The WBXML is analagous to XML in that it represents documents structured with elements and attributes. Differences between WBXML and XML include:

• Structure is denoted by binary codes rather than textual markup.
• There is no representation of comments in WBXML.
• Use of internal entities is constrained (see section "Document Tokenisation")
• There is no representation for markup declarations; DTD information may be included by reference.
  • While XML 1.0 requires a web address (URI) as the system identifier for external DTD references, WBXML allows a public identifier alone to serve as an external reference.
  • In XML, a public identifer is a string of characters. WBXML allows well-known integers to be used as public identifier; the first 128 are "reserved for use in future WAP specifications."
• WBXML includes a number of extension mechanisms, including global extension tokens, well known code-pages, and opaque data.

From the abstract:

The WBXML encoding format is a simple binary tokenized format. It was designed to reduce the transmission size of XML documents, and to reduce the complexity of client XML parser implementations.

Meanwhile, flate compression is very suitable for compressing XML grammars such as SVG and it is already part of HTTP 1.1. The benefits of flate compression versus binary tokenization vary considerably with the size of the document and the available energy, memory, and processor speed.

Next Steps

The W3C membership is invited to discuss the disposition of the submission in the w3c-ac-forum mailing list or to advise the Director via the team contact.

The participants of the XML Activity and the Mobile Access Activity are invited to review WBXML for possible use in their work.

Disclaimer: Placing a Submission on a Working Group agenda does not imply endorsement by either the W3C Staff or the participants of the Working Group, nor does it guarantee that the Working Group will agree to take any specific action on a Submission.