xml-dev - RE: Schemas and Other Crucial XML Questions

[Dave Carlson <dcarlson@ontogenics.com>]

At 09:43 AM 8/10/98 -0400, David Megginson wrote:
>Sam Gentile writes:

> > > Also, we have been hearing rumors of a "short" XML notation. Is
> > > there one?  We have a need to reduce the size of our buffers.
>
>No, there is no such thing.  XML's parent, SGML, included extensive
>facilities for markup minimisation and has suffered badly for it,
>since SGML tools are far too difficult to write (there is still not a
>single Java-based SGML parser, beside probably more than a dozen
>Java-based XML parsers).
>
>There are, however, alternatives: for example, you could compile the
>XML to a compact binary format for internal storage then decompile it
>back to a verbose format for export -- there's no requirement to store
>it internally as text.
>

It's important to note that an XML stream can be very highly compresses with
standard tools like WinZIP.  I have an XML file that's about 20K size, which
includes many repititions of a small number of tags.  WinZIP produced 97%
compression on this file!

The standard Java library includes a zip utility class for zipping/unzipping
streams, so it's possible to dramatically reduce transmission bandwidth
while retaining long, descriptive tag names.

Cheers,
  Dave Carlson


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