Friday, September 12, 2003

The Internet Book Race. "When it comes to books, Internet selling has not led to uniformly low prices. By Virginia Postrel." Interesting analysis. When Amazon raises prices by X, it loses a smaller percentage of customers than Barnes and Noble does when it raises prices by X. This implies there is something besides price that users value about Amazon. Let's call it "BRAND." 8:57:23 AM

Binary XML Standard Considered Harmful --Followup. Omri and I seem to have reached agreement on the appropriate degree of standardization of XML-Infoset serializations. See my prior response to Omri for background. I repost my comments here: Omri, thanks for the clarification. As long as you agree that domain-specific XML-Infoset-serializations (wow, thats a mouthfull) are a good idea, then we are in complete agreement. I completely agree that XML 1.0 (and its descendents, 1.1, etc.) should be the one and only UNIVERSAL XML-Infoset-serialization that spans (interoperates across) all domains. Why? because as your discussion illuminates, an "optimized universal" serialization is an oxymoron because optimization is always relative to a domain-specific set of concerns. 5:31:55 AM