RE: Abbreviated Tag Names

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 01:14 AM 23/01/01 -0800, Don Park wrote:

>While tag/attribute name abbreviation can be done by
>applications using various mechanisms such as Architectural
>Forms, etc., my interest leans toward design time rather than
>runtime.  For example, it would be immensely helpful in mCommerce
>applications to have a standard abbreviated XML-DSIG, SOAP, ebXML,
>XP tag names.  

I'm sure others have asked, but I don't seem to have seen it; this
whole approach seems questionable to me.  Tags are after all text,
highly repetitive text at that, and so is what goes in between them,
and between the quote marks of attributes.  Wouldn't you come out
way ahead just applying LZ or equivalent to the whole chunk of XML?
Compressing is a little CPU-pricey but decompression is nearly free,
and ought to present no greater software load than the code that
knows about magic abbreviated tags.

Or am I missing something? -Tim