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Technology: Google takes a Swipe at XML
XML has its roots going back to SGML in the 1980s and has been with us as a standard since 1997. The advantage of XML is that it is a simple way to serialize and exchange structured data. It’s detractors though have said that the representation is bloated and inefficient.
Despite its verbosity, there has been good acceptance of what XML can do and appreciation for its very simplicity. Google now is taking a different tack. Google Maps and Gmail have popularized AJAX, a driver of Web 2.0 technologies. In order to provide a smoother, more interactive and responsive web application experience, Google’s web apps make frequent trips back to the server, communicating back and forth between client and server using brief data chunks. XML is a popular method to use to encapsulate the data in those conversations. But XML can slow down the communication because of the size of the transfers. JavaScript-specific data exchange methods like JSON have become popular because of their more concise representation.
Now Google is pioneering yet another way. They’re calling it Protocol Buffers. It uses a binary interface definition language. Data is compiled on the server and then transmitted to the client where it is locally interpreted. The bandwidth of the transmissions are tiny, but more processing is required at the client to interpret the transmmissions. A new approach. And maybe a better way.
But the worry is that Google is adopting a unilateral approach to the web in the toolsets that it develops, much the same way that Microsoft dominated desktops and dictated the developer tools for that platform.
