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On Nov 18, 2003, at 6:32 PM, Joshua Allen wrote:
> - people gripe
> about parse speed of XML as if it will be faster when it's binary, and
> I
> think this is incorrect from two perspectives -- first is that we have
> shown XML-oriented protocols to be faster than binary in many cases,
> and
> second because there is still tons of room for improvement in text
> parsing speeds (the fact that gen 1 of XML parsers is slow simply
> proves
> that they are gen 1 parsers, not that text is inherently slower than
> binary).
>
Hmm. At the binary XML workshop [yeah, yeah, "binary serialization of
the XML Infoset"] , lots of people were talking about XML being 10x
slower than comparable binary technologies. (Mind you, I personally
think this is a very reasonable price to pay in most circumstances,
but I would like to get the facts straight).
Can you point to anything public that shows that XML-oriented protocols
to be faster than binary? Again I agree that XML parsing is seldom a
bottleneck, so XML *applications* are often just as fast as binary
ones, but I'm not so sure about "protocols."
On the "gen 1-ness" of XML parsers, that was a very good point I
learned about at the workshop. On the other hand, many of the
optimizations to produce significant speedups depend on a shared
schema. I have a philosophical question: If an XML distributed
application depends on a shared schema, in what sense is it more
loosely coupled than an ASN.1 application? [One answer could be that
the XML parsing can always revert to the parsing of well-formed XML
into an infoset if schemas don't match, whereas ASN.1 is more fragile
... I don't know if that really works in practice].
I for one don't think that MS is producing "FUD" on binary XML; they
just tend to see XML as *only* an interchange format between databases,
objects and applications rather than something that would be natively
stored, processed, displayed, etc. in an application-neutral or
schema-neutral manner. I suspect the party line will change when WinFS
and Yukon / XQuery mature <duck> and they don't need to be so dependent
on specific schemas.
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