On Semantics and Markup: "When
On Semantics and Markup: "When you get an ASN.1 message, you can unpack it and you get the data items and their types. So you know: This is a fraction with 2 digits of precision, this is a 17-character string, this is a non-negative integer, and so on. But, you don't get labels.
XML, on the other hand, tells you: this is called price, this is called Bill-To, and this is called quantity-shipped, but (by default) tells you nothing about data types.
To oversimplify, XML is winning and ASN.1 is losing. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one of them is that it seems to be more important to know what something is called than what data type it is. This result is not obvious from first principles, and has to count as something of a surprise in the big picture."