XML Re: [sldev] Opening the server source?

[Joshua Bell]

Dzonatas wrote:
> Compression methods better than RLE use a technique to replace common 
> pattens with shorter ones, and they put the original pattern in an 
> array. It wouldn't be to hard to compress XML keywords this way, so 
> those aren't critical for size counts.

Before anyone goes off to try reinventing the wheel, there are existing 
projects in place to study more efficient transportation of XML (e.g. 
binary formats, compression schemes, etc)

    http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/

Which appears to be the follow-on to a working group explicitly focused 
on binary XML formats:

    http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary/

Token-based compressors (think: gzip) take care of a lot of XML's 
verbosity (i.e. tags & attributes). The next killer is often numbers - 
ints and floats bloat up when serialized as strings, and efficiently 
compressing those requires some understanding of the data being 
serialized as XML in the first place.