Binary XML

[Jeff Brooks]

I was curious what you guys think about binary formats vs text formats.

Does the fact that the XML standards body is looking into binary XML
affect any of your views?

Information about their binary work is available here:
http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary/

Jeff Brooks

 

[Andy Fish]

I was curious what you guys think about binary formats vs text formats.

Does the fact that the XML standards body is looking into binary XML
affect any of your views?

Information about their binary work is available here:
http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary/

Jeff Brooks

my two cents:

In general, where the space requirements of a text based solution make it
difficult to store or transmit, the storage or transmission medium should be
responsible for compressing the xml using a generic compression mechanism,
and this should be considered an implementation detail not visible to the
application programmer. only in extreme cases is there a need for a specific
binary format.

 

[Magnus Henriksson]

I was curious what you guys think about binary formats vs text formats.

Does the fact that the XML standards body is looking into binary XML
affect any of your views?

Information about their binary work is available here:
http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary/

Jeff Brooks

In my opinion, there are lots of things to consider before moving to binary
formats:

- Can an XML document be separate from the text that makes up the document?
The current XML recommendation only specifies the syntax in terms of text
strings (a sequence of characters). Anything else is not XML.

- Does file size matter? Storage and transmission capacities are continually
improved; will there be a market for binary XML when the [binary] Working
Group is done? Even so, will it be smaller than a gzipped XML file?

- Will binary XML be faster to load? Only if you assume that you do not need
to parse/validate the document. Do you trust binary XML to be correct at all
times?

- Will binary XML be faster to generate/serialize? I'm not so sure.

- Does it matter that the XML document is human readable and editable?


// Magnus