I just love this binary XML thing. John Bobowicz brings up the topic in an article I ran across today:

Is this a memory lapse?

It seems we've forgotten what the notion of a Markup Language is all about. XML, like other markup languages such as HTML and WML, tag portions of text documents for one reason or another. HTML marks up text for formatting purposes and XML marks up text to make data embedded in a text document more machine readable.

All of these things are about making documents more useful. Formating documents, embedding data in documents, etc, is the purpose of markup languages.

The other thing we are forgetting is that binary formats are platform optimized. This optimization is a leading cause for incompatibility between dissimilar systems.

We've been down this road before, and it wasn't that long ago. I give you... CORBA. I guess the only good things about binary XML and WS* is that the people involved aren't doing greater harm somewhere else...