[Standards-JIG] proto-JEP: Smart Presence Distribution

[Kevin Smith]

On 1 Jun 2006, at 14:38, Carlo v. Loesch wrote:
> | The other assertion - that parsing it takes an increased amount of
> | time - is debatable, I'd want to see figures on that before  
> accepting
> | it.
>
> It's technical, when you know how much data is coming your way, you
> can instruct your libs/kernel to just put the next XY octets straight
> into a buffer, whereas with XML you have to parse everything because
> you never know *when* the final closing tag comes your way.

I've been skimming this topic for far too long now and I have a very  
simple take on it.
I think there's a couple of viewpoints with people convinced their  
mental models are correct and so arguing their cases. Perhaps I've  
been doing research too long and I've been corrupted by scientific  
approaches but I've learned (the hard way) that mental models are not  
good things to go on. Make some models, run the models, get some  
results, analyse the results, interpret the results, publish the  
results. This is really the only way to determine the relative merits  
of different models and the knowledge gained in the process is rarely  
wasted. I think this topic is unlikely to reach a constructive  
conclusion until we have some pokable, transparent facts removed from  
assumptions about stream behaviours.

And, by the way, I'd actually be pretty interested in seeing the  
results myself.
/K

-- 
Kevin Smith
Psi Jabber client developer/project leader (http://psi-im.org/)
Postgraduate Research Student, Computer Science, University Of Exeter