[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message]

Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative

• To: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>
• Subject: Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
• From: Dennis Sosnoski <dms@s...>
• Date: Thu, 06 Feb 2003 03:58:07 -0800
• Cc: Tahir Hashmi <code_martial@s...>, xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <E18gipa-0005MH-00@c...>
• References: <p04330103ba65690e85d6@[192.168.254.4]> <E18gSS5-0001Vl-00@c...> <20030206125545.5a135769.code_martial@s...> <E18gipa-0005MH-00@c...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20021130

Alaric B. Snell wrote:

>>* Competition with compression: xqML in it's current format is as
>>  structured as XML so it too compresses well. In an experiment[1] a
>>  12 kB HTML document zipped to 2 kB. The (handwritten) BE for the
>>  same document took 3 kB and when zipped, it took less than 1000
>>  bytes.
>>    
>>
>
>Mmmm, it bugs me when people compare gzipped XML with $binary_format. They 
>should compare XML with $binary_format and gzipped XML with gzipepd 
>$binary_format. gzipped $binary_format will, in general, be the smallest of 
>them all, and yet faster to read/write than gzipped XML.
>
It doesn't necessarily (or even generally) work that way - compact 
binary formats don't generally compress down as well as text, so you end 
up with size(text) > size(binary) > size(compressed-binary) > 
size(compressed-text). That seemed to be the case with my XMLS format 
(http://www.sosnoski.com/opensrc/xmls - still on hold, though I hope to 
get back to it soon). One of the oddities of how compression works... 
David Mertz has done some research in this area - see his article at 
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/x-matters13.html Also see 
James Cheney's paper "Compressing XML with Mulitplexed Hierarchical PPM 
Models" at http://www.cs.cornell.edu/People/jcheney/xmlppm/paper/paper.html

Try a range of documents and see how the compression works out before 
making any claims. For compression of XML text bzip2 looks like the best 
choice from what I've seen, so that should probably be the basis for 
comparison.

  - Dennis

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
    • From: Alaric Snell <alaric@a...>

• References:
  • Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
    • From: Elliotte Rusty Harold <elharo@m...>
  • Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
    • From: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>
  • Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
    • From: Tahir Hashmi <code_martial@s...>
  • Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
    • From: "Alaric B. Snell" <alaric@a...>

• Prev by Date: Re: SML: Second Try
• Next by Date: RE: SGML->XML->? (was Re: SML: Second Try)
• Previous by thread: Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
• Next by thread: Re: Xqueeze: Compact XML Alternative
• Index(es):
  • Date
  • Thread