Re: [mmox] The Structure and Interpretation of LLSD Messages [Was: Re: unefficient binary serialization ?]

[Jon Watte <[e-mail]>]

Morgaine wrote:
> While such gateways are fine for non-interactive streaming downloads, 
> unfortunately they introduce latency that can ruin the interactive 
> experience.

In my experience, having done exactly that in some solutions, that 
technical argument doesn't hold water in practice. As long as the 
gateway is close to the source (or destination), and the translator is 
implemented competently, the addition in latency can be fractions of a 
millisecond. Compared to just random noise and jitter from the greater 
Internet, you would be hard pressed to even reliably measure that.

That being said, if someone is proposing the origination of high-volume 
real-time data as XML, then I have to respectfully disagree with the 
proposal on general principle -- for the same reason that we don't try 
to originate, say, streaming video, or telephony voice data as XML. When 
it will generally be transfered binary, you probably want to originate 
it binary, to avoid the dual overhead of first generating XML, and then 
un-generating it again.

Sincerely,

jw