[Xml-bin] Re: Another binary XML approach

Olivier Dubuisson Olivier.Dubuisson@francetelecom.com
Thu, 12 Apr 2001 20:48:13 +0000


Stefan Zier wrote:
> 
> I wasn't saying that every XML applications should have a man in the middle,
> but as WAP shows, there are applications in which it does make a lot of
> sense. In my opinion it would make sense to agree on a standard binary
> encoding to avoid reinventing the wheel for each one of these applications.
> 
> Unfortunately, most generic compression algorithms such as the
> dictionary-based one used by gzip are not suitable for embedded devices like
> mobile appliances and cell phones due to their fairly high resource
> consumption (memory and CPU cycles). Also, they're too costly to be applied
> to high-volume transactional applications.
> 
> This is just a guess, but I think that a significant simplification and
> improvement in efficiency (both im compression ratio and resource
> consumption) could be achieved by an XML-specific compression scheme over
> generic schemes such as gzip. However, it needs careful design - remember,
> the simple yet suitable solutions are the most difficult ones to find.

I agree with all your arguments.
These are precisely for such arguments (avoid reinventing the wheel,
embedded devices, high-volume transactions, efficiency, compression ratio,
careful design) that my company (with others) supports what is described at:
http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/xml/#schema-mapping (I expect some better material as 
soon as I can find some time!) and try to benefit from both XML and the
success story with ASN.1 and its associated PER encoding.
-- 
Olivier DUBUISSON
france telecom R&D
     _                 DTL/MSV - 22307 Lannion Cedex - France
    ( )           tel: +33 2 96 05 38 50 - fax: +33 2 96 05 39 45
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