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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: standard compressed XML format?
 I don't think I was clear enough about what I was asking for earlier. While these various tools for compressing XML are interesting, and use a wide variety of promising strategies, none of them are currently set up to be built into a compress-before-transmission/decompress-on-receipt framework that's invisible to the user. The WAP approach is probably the closest to what I'm thinking about, but the WAP forum has control over the entire transmission cycle. Building support for this binary encoding into WAP devices is easy. Making compression/decompression work across existing Internet frameworks is a lot harder. While HTTP offers some headers that might be useful, they're rarely implemented in an interoperable manner. MIME content types don't provide any information about possible compression, except for formats that are expressly compressed data, content unknown. While graphics formats - notably GIF, JPEG, and PNG - have compression/decompression built in, XML has no such thing. Combined with XML's lack of concern about verbosity (which, in general, I approve of), this gives XML a serious disadvantage compared to binary formats. The main complaint I've seen about SVG, for instance, is that the files are big. When markup documents are a small core referencing larger pieces that are themselves compressed (as with HTML or SMIL), this isn't much of a disadvantage. As we push XML forward as a container for more and more information itself, however, verbosity starts to matter. I'd like to think there's a way to remedy this at the general infrastructure level, rather than requiring either user intervention or application-by-application implementation. It seems like we could save a lot of needless network traffic while strengthening the case for using XML. Simon St.Laurent XML Elements of Style / XML: A Primer, 2nd Ed. Building XML Applications Inside XML DTDs: Scientific and Technical Cookies / Sharing Bandwidth http://www.simonstl.com *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ *************************************************************************** 
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