Re: Request: Techniques for reducing the size of XML instances

["Al B. Snell" <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Wed, 1 Aug 2001, Daniel Barclay wrote:

> Isn't there a significant difference between between parsing for delimiters
> (and requiring escape mechanisms for delimiter characters in data) and
> reading, say, length codes and following fields of the given lengths (not
> that that's the only form of "binary" formats, of course)?

True textual formats never use length codes, but indeed, many binary
formats use scanning for delimiters (ASN.1 does this in some cases; a
large object with lots of little ones can be sent with a length prefix,
but if buffering it all isn't an option, it can be sent as a seqeuence of
blocks with a special null block terminating it).

There are myriads of ways of encoding things; categorising them depending
on what subset of the values 0..255 they use strikes me as odd :-)

What is perhaps really meant by textual is "layered on top of the local
character set", which is a lot less of a fundamental distinction than
might be imagined.

>
> Daniel
>

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
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