"Binary XML" proposals

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 12:22 PM 08/04/01 +0600, Danny Ayers wrote:
> Ok, so if you put all this together,
>what would you be gaining? Say an order or two of magnitude of speed?  (and
>the same kind of gains for data storage)

The world may have a place for binary XML, but the above is not an
argument for it.  First of all, an argument that unpacking a 
binary format (particularly on a machine whose binaries are
different and you have to bit-swizzle) is significantly faster than
XML parsing a la expat or MSXML, needs to supported by actual 
empirical data rather than by assertion.  And suppose, as a thought
experiment, that this were true; if you were to speed up the
XML parsing/generating part of an XML-using application, how much
would that speed up the whole application?  You'd need to know 
what proportion of its time it spends parsing/generating XML.  In
some apps, this proportion is going to be very small.

As for the data storage volume issue, uh, isn't the world awash
in admirable compression technology that works pretty well on
most data formats, and particularly well on redundant textual
stuff like XML?

Absent some good strong empirical evidence, neither processing
nor storage cost are a priori arguments for going binary.

 -Tim