Tracy R Reed wrote: > Tom Gal wrote: >>Personally I think XML is great, and there's a lot of efforts underway >>to optimize it for binary mode transmission etc. on the way. The fact > If you want a space efficient binary why not just pipe it through gzip?
It turns out that you can get more efficiency by taking advantage of the specific nature of XML and then apply generic compression algorithms to the "end result". The other thing is that while gzip makes things compact, it still means you get all the parsing overhead (in fact it makes it worse). The nice thing about binary formats is that an application can route a document by just looking at 4 bytes at a specific offset in the document, rather than having to parse any of the document. Of course, if a binary XML standard emerges that allows one to do all this, it will have pretty much shed all of the "features" of XML. --Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
