Re: "Binary XML" proposals

[Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com>]

Al Snell wrote:
>
> The main bottleneck my XML-parsing friend here (who writes XML handling
> code for a Gnomeish project) complains about in practice is that the
> parser has to malloc a lot of small strings to contain element and
> attribute names, which he then has to do lots of string compares on; he
> talks of the parser using a string table, and whenever it encounters a
> string, reusing the copy from the string table if possible.

That's the approach I used in Cost; it works well.
An added bonus is that you can replace string comparisons
with pointer comparisons.

This starts to break down when you throw namespaces into the
mix though, since element and attribute names are no longer
simple, atomic values.  For example it's possible that
'foo:bar' and 'qux:bar' actually represent the same thing, and
that an element in one part of the tree named 'foo:bar' may
be _different_ than another element with the same name in
a different part of the tree.

I haven't yet seen or thought up a fully satisfactory solution
to this problem...


--Joe English

  jenglish@flightlab.com