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Do you regard office file formats as binary? To me they are application
specific file formats. Even so, is your comparison of these file formats
with XML a lossy comparison? That is does the XML version include all the
application specific information needed to recreate the application file or
is it limited strictly to the data content?
- Dan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@metalab.unc.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 9:55 AM
> To: winkowski@mitre.org; msc@mitre.org; xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> Cc: winkowski@mitre.org; msc@mitre.org
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] XML Binary and Compression
>
>
> 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/ |
> +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+
>
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