Joe Gregorio reports the First Public Working Draft of Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0.  Even that name stinks of bureaucratic ineptitude.

This is my early contender for Worst Idea I've Heard This Year. Or maybe I should save that for this sub-idea:

EXI processors MAY provide the capability to specify different built-in types or user-defined encoder/decoders (CODECS) for representing specific schema types. This capability is called Pluggable CODECS.

Oh yeah, perfect. Because the only thing that could make a non-human-readable data interchange format more valuable would be to marry it with the robustness, ease-of-use, and interoperability that we associate with video and audio codecs.

And the wonderful thing about this is that this will be marketed as having something to do with performance, because, oh yeah, a linear decrease in the size of your messages -- that will solve your architectural problems. So people with performance issues with their Web services will solve them by introducing another layer of complexity, making the data non-readily inspectable, and throwing proprietary codecs into the midst. I can't see why that wouldn't work.