Re: "Binary XML" proposals

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 02:00 PM 10/04/01 +0100, Christian Nentwich wrote:
> Of course loading binary files is
>faster than parsing huge text files, anyone who's been in this field for
>any time will tell you that, without needing empirical evidence. 

Er, just one data point, but I've been in this field since 1981
and have written a *lot* of software and have a special focus
on optimization.  In my experience, assertions about what will
make software run faster, when not backed up by empirical
profiling data, are not worth wasting time on.  I have seen
untold amounts of time wasted by overeager junior programmers
who just knew, "without needing empirical evidence", that 
putting a hash-table in, or some such, would make their app
go faster, when some profiling work would have shown that
their performance was dominated by I/O buffer management.

So, Sean may have used strong language, but in point of fact
he was correct, so it's forgivable.  Get some data on how
much space and time a binary representation will save, then
you'll be able to make intelligent quantitative decisions 
on where it's worthwhile deploying it.

Until then, it's just amusing speculation.  -Tim