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

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

Al B. Snell wrote:


> Hmmm... I'd forgetten about those. Is it still a "text format" if it can't
> be simply edited in Notepad (which would have to involve manually
> recalculating the Content-Legnth)? :-)


Sure.  You just have to think harder.

 
> Yes. "textual" is a particular subset of "binary". It's no longer really
> about a subset of the 0..255 range either if UTF-8 and so on come into
> it...

No, I don't think it's a subset.  Consider GIF and SVG.  A GIF is a GIF,

and the question "what character set?" just doesn't enter into it.
The standard for GIFs describes what octets are used to represent
pixels, color maps, and so on.


But SVG, being an XML-based standard, can be represented equally well
in, say, ASCII or EBCDIC.  It is defined in terms of what *characters*
are present, which will be the same in either case.  But the octets
will be utterly different: you cannot explain SVG usefully at the
octet level.

-- 
There is / one art             || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
no more / no less              || http://www.reutershealth.com
to do / all things             || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
with art- / lessness           \\ -- Piet Hein