Sure the network may be "fast enough" from a raw mbps perspective. The problem is, in a real-world scenario your application may not be the only user of that bandwidth. And if everyone is stuffing the network full of data bloated with excessive overhead (such as what XML specifies), you can choke the network. It's not rocket science -- cut the data-bloat on the network in half and you double the capacity/performance. Even if the network is not running at full capacity, cutting the traffic in half (via more efficient data transport protocols) makes everything run more smoothly and doubles the lifetime of the existing infrastructure (i.e., it will take twice as long to fill up), ultimately reducing cost.

This article is entirely about parsing performance, not the size of XML... the problem is that parsing can't keep up with the speed of the network...
XmL is not slow, *xml parsers* are slow

This article seems to miss the point of the performance critism of XML. The problem is not so much one of parsing (although that is an issue), but network bandwidth. From a bandwith perspective, XML is just about the world's most inefficient protocol one could devise for transmitting data. If binary XML could cut the file size even just in half, that doubles an applications network performance.

There is no reason why you could not perform the same job as text-XML with binary-XML. You would gain significant performance benefits with the only downside being that you lose immediate human readability. You know... sometimes it seems that XML was embraced and championed by a lot of young, wet-behind-the-ears HTML hackers who didn't know how to read hex. :)

> queZZtion commented on the 31 Aug 2006:
> MSFT submitted OpenXML to ECMA, anyone
> know if they plan to submit it to ISO too?

Microsoft's Open XML is just a delay tactic -- their old strategy of vaporware vaporware vaporware ... that sometimes materializes at the last second, never as grand as promised, but having accomplished its goal of causing everyone to say "Let's wait and see what Microsoft will do first!"

And MOX is Latin for "soon". Coincidence?!

MSFT submitted OpenXML to ECMA, anyone know if they plan to submit it to ISO too?

HR-XML Anyone? View link: [visit link]

Responding to your comment #1

It doesn't see that we are disagreeing, because if the CPU is devoting much cycles on application logic, then there is less incentive going to binary XML with the hope of speeding up overall app performance

Concerning your comment #2, built-in indexing is not just for binary XML, it can be done for XML as well, so this argument is quite weak... or do I misintepret anything??

I don't quite buy your argument.

1) You are only looking at a single process assuming that the CPU has nothing better to do than parsing and processing. On a server any performance improvement will help server throughput.

2) The main benefit of a binary format would be built in indexing. If done properly DOM wouldn't have to build much of a structure at all but rather work directly on the binary image and extract nodes on request.

3) I don't really see a SAX parser getting a drastic improvement though.

Since its inception, XML has been criticized for the overhead it introduces into the enterprise infrastructure. Business data encoded in XML takes five to 10 times more bandwidth to transmit in the network and proportionally more disk space to store. While most agree that verbosity is inherent to XML's way of encoding information (e.g., extensive use of tags and pointy brackets), the explanation of XML's perceived performance issue remains inconclusive. A popular belief is that since XML is human-readable text, it has to be slow and inefficient. And by the same token, proponents of binary XML seem to suggest that a compact encoding format, most noticeably the binary XML, would automatically lead to better processing performance.

Since its inception, XML has been criticized for the overhead it introduces into the enterprise infrastructure. Business data encoded in XML takes five to 10 times more bandwidth to transmit in the network and proportionally more disk space to store. While most agree that verbosity is inherent to XML's way of encoding information (e.g., extensive use of tags and pointy brackets), the explanation of XML's perceived performance issue remains inconclusive. A popular belief is that since XML is human-readable text, it has to be slow and inefficient. And by the same token, proponents of binary XML seem to suggest that a compact encoding format, most noticeably the binary XML, would automatically lead to better processing performance.