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J.Pietschmann writes:
> Yes, there is no standard, nor a COTS implementation in wide use.
> However, I've seen various applications and frameworks rolling
> their own. In particular Cocoon can store a SAX event stream in a
> sort of "binary XML", for the purpose of caching intermediate
> results in an XML processing pipeline. Admittedly, this usage is a
> bit special.
Many applications will store data in an optimized internal format for
efficiency. XML is about interchange, however, and there does not
seem to be a screaming demand to interchange binary files instead of
XML documents.
I remember one paper where a person experimented with passing around a
serialized DOM tree and was surprised to find that it was larger than
the original, uncompressed XML. It would be possible to do better, of
course, but we'd have to figure out what side of the 80/20 boundary
we'd be on. We may just have to accept that the Tim B. twins (Tim
Berners-Lee and Tim Bray) have been right all along, and that
text-based formats really are efficient enough for the vast majority
of applications.
Finally, remember that standards are about the majority, not the
minority. A standard is justified only if a lot of people use it:
there's no point standardizing for a few dozen users, since they can
work out a defacto solution if they need one. It's the same reason
that a quiet residential intersection needs only a stop sign (or
perhaps not even that), while a busy intersection needs a street light
or even an overpass.
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson, david@megginson.com, http://www.megginson.com/
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