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In September, the W3C will host a workshop on binary XML formats. Your first reaction may be the same as mine: what the heck is binary XML? Binary XML is an attempt to find a common format for communicating pre-parsed XML trees to reduce bandwidth and the time it takes to parse large XML documents. The audience is primarily embedded and similar applications, but of course, once the genie's out of the bottle, it will be used in all sorts of applications.

He lists a number of advantages, but here's the main issue I see - into what kind of object model does this get parsed? It almost certainly won't be consistent with the object model that the XML parser I use (or other people use, for that matter) produce - which means that every single application that consumes XML will need a gratuitous change. Here's two words: mod-gzip