Re: "Binary XML" proposals

[ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Henry S. Thompson)]

Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com> writes:

<snip/>

> 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

I strongly endorse Tim's point.  I just wasted a weekend getting my
schema validator to dump the internal form of the 'compiled'
schema-for-schemas, on the _assumption_ that reloading that would be
faster than parsing/compiling the schema-document-for-schemas every
time I needed it.  Wrong.  Takes more than twice as long to reload the
binary image than to parse/compile the XML.

There are _lots_ of people out there working hard to make
parsing/writing XML blindingly fast.  With respect, you're unlikely to 
beat them.

ht
-- 
  Henry S. Thompson, HCRC Language Technology Group, University of Edinburgh
          W3C Fellow 1999--2001, part-time member of W3C Team
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	    Fax: (44) 131 650-4587, e-mail: ht@cogsci.ed.ac.uk
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