Is there anyone working on a binary version of XML?

[Anders W. Tell]

Rick Jelliffe wrote:

> I have done a few tests on how much compacter forms of XML (e.g.
> shortrefs) impact arrival characteristics of document packet-groups
> under TCP/IP compared to compression.  If your packet size is small, and
> you really need to get at data in the first packet (so that you can
> piggy back request for auto-linked resources in with the ACK for the
> first packet group), then more compact forms of markup may make a
> difference. But in general, compression is more effective. (It also
> depends on where the bottlenecks are in your data path.)

It seems that there are more use-cases which should benefit from having a
compressed or a binary format.

I made some tests using following XML data.
<xmltest>
   <xi4 value="0" name="VALUE"/>
   <xi4 value="32768" name="VALUE"/>
    ...
</xmltest>

The resulting sizes was:
XML       602830     (Standard XML text)
FML       131143     (Fast ML, a binary ml that Im working on)
XML.gz    75528      (gzip'ed XML text using -9 as compression rate)
FML.gz     20886     (gzip'ed Fast ML using -9 as  compression rate)

The facinating result here is the dramatic reduction in size obtained by first
converting to FML and the GZIP the markup stream.

> And select your element and attribute
> names so that their length is inverse to their frequency, as much as
> possible: so use "a:s" not "abracadabra:shazamarama" (you may even make
> two versions of your DTD: an authoring one and a transmission one.) One
> pof the main bottleneck on many SOHO systems is the modem speed:
> reducing the end-to-end character count means fewer packets, and more
> data arrives earlier, so more auto-links are followed earlier.

On the other hand there is a big drawback  using "manual tag compression"
which is Readability.

/Anders
--
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/  Financial Toolsmiths AB  /
/  Anders W. Tell           /
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