Meng,
What kind of person are you dealing with? Is s/he a manager or a
worker? A technical or a financial person? More than five years of IT
experience or less? Depending on this you have to pick the arguments.
Apart from the ones that were mentioned on the mailing list try this:
For a technical person: What people call "extensibility" when they
deal with XML, is actually just unspecified semantics. It's a loophole
that people can use to put in information that was not specified in
the original definition. This in turn means, that the semantics of the
exchanged documents is not well-defined. The famous Humpty Dumpty
Quote from Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass"
(http://mural.uv.es/masanar/10.html) applies here:
[..]
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less."
"'The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so
many different
things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - that's
all."
[..]
<<<<<
If you want all kinds of systems from different vendors to
interoperate, there is no room for fuzziness in the standard. XML
comes with built-in fuzziness, which makes it unsuitable for a
standard.
For a manager / financial person you can try this one: Encoding an SPF
query (and the reply) in XML actually turns it into an asynchronous
remote procedure call (RPC). An open standard for this kind of thing
is XML-RPC. XML-RPC only allows synchronous calls, so it was extended
into SOAP which also allows asynchronous calls and all kinds of
underlying transport protocols (HTTP, SMTP, etc.) Once you use an
XML payload for a UDP packet, the argument can be made that this is
equivalent to doing SOAP over UDP. Soon after XML-RPC came out, and
work was started on SOAP, Microsoft hired a lot of the key players in
that field, like Don Box, etc. So it's safe to say that Microsoft owns
a lot of patents related to area where XML, RPC, asynchronous calls,
and load balancing intersect. If SPF-XML becomes the standard,
Microsoft (or somebody else from the Web Services Scene) might one day
pull out one of their patents and sue everybody who's using it.
Carsten
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