Binary XML would make my working life easier

Article:
Binary Killed the XML Star?

Subject: Binary XML would make my working life easier

Date: 2003-11-22 03:47:48

From: Anthony Coates

Let's be honest - there are a *lot* of applications which involve small XML messages sent infrequently. For these, I don't see any much to gain from binary XML. On the other hand, there are some areas, such as digital video and finance, where bandwidth is still a major issue. These areas need a compressed method for sending XML, because cheap limitless bandwidth hasn't arrived as quickly as some people expected (particularly on the private circuits used by the financial community).

For my work in finance, the size of textual XML is the biggest barrier that I come across, and I come across it a lot. Where people are sensitive to what the bandwidth costs, the more compression the better. You can ZIP/GZIP your XML, and that helps, but I'm finding that Schema-sensitive compression (which is what binary XML comes down to in many cases) is typically 5x better, and that's a big saving.

You also need a binary format that supports streaming decompression. ZIP doesn't (the index is at the end of the file, as I remember). If you are sending XML files with millions of records (as I want to be able to), you don't want to have to decompress that into a multi-gigabyte file if you can avoid it. So a compressed format that streams into SAX is great. I'm also not opposed to the enhancement of SAX to support Schema datatypes. It makes no great sense in a data application to have a compressed format that knows the difference between an integer and a string, but which then decompresses everything into strings so that the application can turn some of them back into integers. So SAX+datatypes would be a great addition. It's not what the document world wants, but it would be a good thing indeed for the data world.

So, remember, there are some areas that really are disadvantaged by text-only transports for XML. Certainly we don't all need it all of the time. But some of us do need it some of the time.

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