Re: almost four years ago....

[Alaric Snell <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

Quoting Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>:


> There seems to be a large group of programmers who 
> mistakenly believe:
> 
> 1. File size matters.
> 2. They can compress better than gzip.

This is easy to do. GZIP is massively crippled by having no information about 
the structure of the file - it's just a string of bytes that it has to make 
some assumptions about the probable structure of with regards to frequency 
distributions that won't even apply very well to XML; it's trivial to write 
something that compresses better, especially if you use gzip for what it's best 
at (the CDATA) and handle the <> bits yourself.

> 3. Human legible/human editable data doesn't matter.

Indeed, we must never use image files, filesystems, or gzip - they'll never 
take off :-)

> All three beliefs have been empirically proven false time and time
> again.

Chuckle!

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software