Cart
[Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries]
Do you regard office file formats as binary? To me they are application specific file formats. Even so, is your comparison of these file formats with XML a lossy comparison? That is does the XML version include all the application specific information needed to recreate the application file or is it limited strictly to the data content? - Dan > -----Original Message----- > From: Elliotte Rusty Harold [mailto:elharo@m...] > Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 9:55 AM > To: winkowski@m...; msc@m...; xml-dev@l... > Cc: winkowski@m...; msc@m... > Subject: RE: XML Binary and Compression > > > At 11:54 PM -0500 3/10/03, winkowski@m... wrote: > >The military has been building binary messages optimized for > size efficiency > >for decades. Our group has been working over the past > several years to > >express a variety of messages, some based on binary > specifications and some > >delimitated ASCCI, in XML. In all cases the XML version of > these messages > >are larger than the original binary or ASCII. Is this > surprising? I don't > >think so - metadata is not transmitted in either binary or > delimitated ASCII > >formats. You state that the fact that binary files are > smaller than the > >equivalent XML is decidedly untrue based on your experience. > Quite frankly > >this surprises me. Our own experience is just the opposite. > > Very possibly then we're working in different environments with > different kinds of data. I routinely work in the desktop space and > occasionally work in the desktop space and occasionally on the > server. Some developers who work with embedded systems have pointed > out to me that my experience colors my perceptions, as theirs colors > theirs. > > I suspect you're working with very different software and file > formats than I am. For instance, based on what you report I > hypothesize that you're not working with relational databases or > office documents like spreadsheets and word processor files, or you > could hardly have avoided noticing that XML is more efficient in > practice than binary formats. But I don't know what you are working > with, and I don't know in which environments your results are > relevant. > -- > > +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ > | Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@m... | Writer/Programmer | > +-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+ > | Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002) | > | http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava | > | http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA | > +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ > | Read Cafe au Lait for Java News: http://www.cafeaulait.org/ | > | Read Cafe con Leche for XML News: http://www.cafeconleche.org/ | > +----------------------------------+---------------------------------+ >
|
