Free Tool for Efficient XML Data Compression

KenNorth KenNorth at email.msn.com
Mon Dec 20 08:21:25 GMT 1999


> >HIGHLIGHT. It is known that XML files tend to be larger than files in
> >application specific data formats.
>
>
> While XMill sounds interesting, I really have to take issue with this
> statement.  I've seen no evidence that XML based, uncompressed file
> formats are larger than the corresponding binary file formats. This
> is a common fear about XML but I have not seen it borne out in my
> tests.

The difference in size between application data, and its XML counterpart,
seems to be application-dependent (and schema-dependent). Message processing
applications, for example, use techniques such as piggybacking to reduce the
size of a data stream.

If the "application specific data format" is a normalized SQL database,
there are likely to be differences because the normalization process
eliminates redundant data. (A billing address would be stored only once, not
once per order.)

This Note to the W3C documents a sizeable increase when moving from EDI
(EDIFACT) messages to XML/EDI:

http://www.xml-edifact.org/TR/NOTE-xml-edifact.html

Check out section 7 (the TeleOrdering UK example).






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