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Article:
Binary XML, Again
Subject: You're 3/4 right
Date: 2003-08-14 12:12:52
From: Tony Parisi
Kendall, your thoughtful rant is almost totally on the money. You clearly grasp the information science aspects of the XML self-description issue: maybe it's self-documenting, which is a goodness; but outside of providing structural clues, an XML document doesn't do anything to describe itself.


Also, your insistence on seeing a clear business case for binary XML is fair enough. Else why bother undertaking such a huge enterprise?


You're obviously a bright guy. How can you be so clueless to not see the value of compressing rich and complex data sets? The world contains far more than text. Gzip compression is simply not adequate for reducing the size of, say, 3D data. Take a look at what we're doing with X3D and you'll see that gzip will never be a satisfactory solution. The key is that rich data such as 3D can be compressed far beyond simple LZ by leveraging domain-specific information with techniques such as quantization, to name just one: if you know all your numbers lie within a certain range you can greatly reduce the space requirements for storage; LZ just can't do anything like that. It only looks for repetitions.


Oh, and you want numbers? Our preliminary tests in developing a binary format yield compression factors of upwards of 30 to 1. Try doing that with gzip.


Tony Parisi

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