RE: "Binary XML" proposals

[Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@ebt.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. 

Hmmm. I ran some tests a while ago on JAVA serialization vs.
serialization to XML, and binary RPC vs XML-RPC. I found reading
and writing the *binary* JAVA serialization to be around 3x slower
than writing to XML and reading it back in... conversely, I
found XML-RPC to be about 3x slower than binary RPC.

At the end of the day, there are *huge* numbers of variables
that play a part in performance. One thing I've found is that
the performance of the data structures that the XML encodes
is a *huge* factor. A naive DOM implementation will take
ages to construct, regardless of the speed of parsing.

Somewhat related, you'll find that an application-specific
format is almost always fast than a generic one. This
applies to XML as well as anything else.