RE: Textual transmission typically faster?

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Thu, 18 Jan 2001, Eugene Kuznetsov wrote:

> > I recall one of the presenters at XTech last year had been
> > experimenting with using a Java-serialized DOM rather than the source
> > XML document, and was surprised to find that the Java-serialized DOM
> > was both considerably larger than the *uncompressed* XML and
> > considerably slower to load.
>
> That shouldn't be surprising -- generally speaking a parse tree is
> larger than the text input to the parser. (And java serialization
> doesn't win any awards for efficiency in either time or space).
>
> However, a binary representation of the same data (specified in
> ASN.1 and encoded using BER, say) would be much smaller and more
> efficient.

Stefano Mazzocchi of Apache Cocoon project fame (now left that project)
has developed a binary serialization of SAX that is significantly faster
to load than the original XML (than Xerces non-validating mode).

I think he did some further work on it to make the binary format
smaller...

http://mailman.real-time.com/pipermail/cocoon-devel/2000-October/002689.html

(warning that page contains the compiler/decompiler itself as a Base64
attachment)

But then this is getting off-topic...

-- 
<Matt/>

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