Less verbose XML

[David Megginson]

Mark Baker writes:

 > At Beduin, we've learned the hard way about how difficult it is to
 > render HTML because some tags don't require end tags (in combo with
 > the general crappy state of HTML generators).  I'd guess that our
 > parser is twice as large as it needed to be because of these
 > problems.  With short end tags, in order for us to render XML, we'd
 > have to have a similar amount of code to render broken XML.  So
 > IMHO, short end tags would make my code larger (though runtime
 > memory requirements *might* drop - not sure).

I think that Mark is quite right.  Just for interest, here are some
statistics, using Jon Bosak's ot.xml (with CRLF line-ends, and with a
different XML declaration at the top):

 With full end tags:    3,880,187 bytes
 With short end tags:   3,773,844 bytes (2.7% saving)

Here are the same files compressed with gzip -9 (savings are relative
to the uncompressed version with full end tags):

 With full end tags:    994,835 bytes (74.4% saving)
 With short end tags:   988,976 bytes (74.5% saving)


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 ak117 at freenet.carleton.ca
Microstar Software Ltd.         dmeggins at microstar.com
      http://home.sprynet.com/sprynet/dmeggins/

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