[
Lists Home |
Date Index |
Thread Index
]
At 11:54 PM -0500 3/10/03, winkowski@mitre.org wrote:
>The military has been building binary messages optimized for size efficiency
>for decades. Our group has been working over the past several years to
>express a variety of messages, some based on binary specifications and some
>delimitated ASCCI, in XML. In all cases the XML version of these messages
>are larger than the original binary or ASCII. Is this surprising? I don't
>think so - metadata is not transmitted in either binary or delimitated ASCII
>formats. You state that the fact that binary files are smaller than the
>equivalent XML is decidedly untrue based on your experience. Quite frankly
>this surprises me. Our own experience is just the opposite.
Very possibly then we're working in different environments with
different kinds of data. I routinely work in the desktop space and
occasionally work in the desktop space and occasionally on the
server. Some developers who work with embedded systems have pointed
out to me that my experience colors my perceptions, as theirs colors
theirs.
I suspect you're working with very different software and file
formats than I am. For instance, based on what you report I
hypothesize that you're not working with relational databases or
office documents like spreadsheets and word processor files, or you
could hardly have avoided noticing that XML is more efficient in
practice than binary formats. But I don't know what you are working
with, and I don't know in which environments your results are
relevant.
--
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
| Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) |
| http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava |
| http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
| Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ |
| Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ |
+----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
|
