Less verbose XML (Was: A little wish for short end tags (Was: RE: SDD bogus))

[Rick Jelliffe]

If you are worried about file size, then compress your files.

Tags, being short strings commonly used, compress really nicely with
the common compression algorithms out there.

I once did an experiment (to confirm one that Gavin Nicol had done)
using a document with  several thousand lines, each with one start-tag, 
end-tag pair and no content. I tried compressing this file with
* no minimization
* short end-tags
* end-tag ommission
The uncompressed file was something like 50K. The compressed files
differed by only a few 100bytes from each other. The gains from short
end-tags did not carry over into the compressed versions, and the
compressed versions were so much smaller there seemed little
contest.

Having short-tag ommision can only compress a document by less
than 50% at an improbable maximum (in the case of a document with 
not data, not attributes, no white-space, and incredibly long GIs). 
Compression is a far better approach.

Rick Jelliffe


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