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From: "Alaric B Snell" <alaric@alaric-snell.com>
> I can't come to this event, but if anyone starts comparing gzip and
> ASN.1, please shout at them for me?
>
> Gzip is something you can do to *any* encoding to get a more compact
> encoding at the loss of time and space costs on encoding and decoding
> devices.
>
> So compare XML to ASN.1's BER or PER, and gzipped XML to gzipped BER or
> PER. I'm sick of seeing people say "I ran this complex compression
> algorithm on my inefficient format and it came out smaller than this
> less inefficient format"!
Oh, it is a little different than that surely: the current web infrastructure
(HTTP's MIME header's view of compression of text/* and the widespread
availability of ZIP decoders on HTTP clients) has a certain level of
support for ZIP already. It is an important aspect.
So a programmer serializing non-XML data may face the choice:
1) generate XML text, and compress. Send to a vanilla client which understands
ZIP.
2) generate some binary (e.g. ASN.1 BER or PER), maybe compress, send to
special purpose client, maybe which needs to be told to uncompress too somehow.
These are completely different approaches at an architectural level, and no
cause to make anyone sick.
Cheers
Rick Jelliffe
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