Is there anyone working on a binary version of XML?

[Alberto Reggiori]

Leigh Dodds wrote:
> Wouldn't a (undoubtedly naive) implementation of this be simply serialising
> the object graph to disk, or through an I/O stream? This is obviously easy
> in Java, and again is only obviously beneficial if the serialised object
> graph is more 'compact' (which I believe is at least partly behind your
> desire) than the original textual version?
> 

I am writing a Web application that provides an Open Web space for
secondary schools in Europe where users can interact with an oodbms
thourgh a treeview like cut/paste/rename/edit paradigm using normal 16MB
pentium PCs and ISDN connections.
One of the big issues of this application is to provide a quick
generation and rendering of
those treeviews inside normal browsers using javascript. The initial
idea was to use a bare bone javascript xml parser on the client
(jeremie.com like) to parse and create the in-memory data structure
(DOMish) of thoses views, but that solution reveals not scaling when the
user requests some 200/300 folders.
The actual solution to those problems is to use a little hack on the
server that generates directly html docs with the parsed js structure in
as nested arrays and hashes that do _not_ need parsing anymore. The
files with the "serialised" trees are a bit larger but the rendering
performances are a _lot_ better. The code is still able to display
textual xml treeviews.

I think would be really useful to have a standard and more compact way
to serialise (dump binary groves/structures) to some specific format
(java, javascript,C,C++) or in a stream of "events" instead of pure text
_only_.

I am not saying that XML should be binary, but that the parsing
businness sometimes is an issue.


Just another brain dump.


Alberto
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