Zac Bowling’s Blog

“XML is to large and bulky to use in server and client communication. Using my ABC compression with the XYZ binary encoding scheme that comes with my ZYX language is much smaller.

I hear this a lot with Java and .NET developers who stream data over basic socket connections, as well as people who used to make their own encoding and data transmition systems in various languages. The fact is that most of these system are specific to your application and don’t make it very easy to allow other developers using other systems to use your data.

On the side of XML being large and bulky, this might be true but I don’t believe that the few extra bytes used in the XML tags really maters to much with the cheaper bandwidth costs. Also, compression systems can be written on a different layer. Since XML is structured like HTML, and can be served up over http very easily, most web server compression systems work great. Then all you need is a piece of client object that can connect to the webserver and download it. Most languages have such objects that can support most types of webserver compression systems. (If not you can always call `wget` or nagotiate down) You could even be as bold as to zip them up as basic XML documents.

One of the great features of XML is that it is “just xml tags” if you are too dumb to understand XML using a built-in libraries. Such is the case when I wrote an application call my webservice running on a MIDP1 J2ME device. Not to many pre-built objects (for the great reason of trying to stay small). XML is gain popularity of being a universal format for data communication now days. Basic communication formats, configuration files, documents (PDF, Word, XHTML, Code Documentation, User Databases, Email) are all starting to use XML in their own systems. This means that if you can read XML, you can call data from all things stored in it without having to reverse engineer a document structure (which is prob. unpublished anyways).