Does the World Need Binary XML?

sebFlyte writes "One of XML's founders says 'If I were world dictator, I'd put a kibosh on binary XML' in this interesting look at what can be done to make XML better, faster and stronger."

Comments

Maybe this is like comparing assembly to C

[Stevyn]

Programs written in assembly can run faster than programs written in C, but it's easier for someone to open a .c file and figure out what's going on.

I'm sure when C came out, the argument was similar that the performance hit doesn't make up for the readability or cross compatibility. But as computers and network connections became faster, C becomes a more viable alternative.

Re:For Starters

[Soko]

Agreed.

However, let me re-phrase the grandparent:

"For starters, make sure Microsoft can't extend it to lock out compeditors in some way."

Better?

Soko

Amen To That

[American AC in Paris]

XML, as originally designed, is deliciously straightforward. Data is encoded into discrete, easy-to-process chunks that any given XML parser can make sense of.

XML, as implemented today, is often little more than a thin wrapper for huge gobs of proprietary-format data. Thus, any given XML parser can identify the contents as "a huge gob of proprietary data", but can't do a damned thing with it.

Too many developers have "embraced" XML by simply dumping their data into a handful of CDATA blocks. Other programmers don't want to reveal their data structure, and abuse CDATA in the same way. Thus, a perfectly good data format has been bastardized by legions of lazy/overprotective coders.

The slew publications exist for the sole purpose of "clarifying" XML serves as testament to the abuse of XML.

Re:Amen To That

[Kingpin]

An XML document is an abstract. The file with tags is a serialization of that document. A binary file would also just be a serialization. Then you deserialize it in your parser - and get the DOM. It's the job of the parser to give you the object represenation, no matter if it were human readable text or binary format.

The data is interchangable either way - only difference is that binary XML file is not immediatly human readable.

Re:Binary = Proprietary

[Adhemar]

Of course binary doesn't equal proprietary. Those are two completely different concepts.

PNG is a binary format. It isn't proprietary, though. And although I can't immediately find a text-based proprietary format, such formats are not impossible (although arguably easier to reverse-engineer than binary proprietary formats).

But if the XML is really such a problem, I suggest the simple solution. Compressing XML with a simple and open algorithm like gzip or bzip2, is the way to go. XML usually compresses very easily.

Re:there are already standards for this...

[rootmonkey]

I'll say it again.. Its not the size of the document its the overhead in parsing.

Re:Step 1 to getting binary XML

[Dasein]

The problem is that many systems that produce XML have a more compact internal storage (rows from a DB or whatever), then they go through an "expansion" to produce XML.

So, to propose simply compressing it means that there's and expansion (which is expensive) followed by a compression (which is really expensive). That seems pretty silly. However, given an upfront knowledge of which tags are going to be generated, it's pretty easy to implement a binary XML format that's fast and easy to decode.

This is what I did for a company that I worked for. We did it because performance was a problem. Now, if we don't get something like this through the standards bodies, more companies are going to do what mine did and invent thier own format. That's a problem -- back to the bad old days before we had XML for interoperability.

Now, if we get something good through the standards body then, even though it won't be human readable, it should be simple to provide converters. To have something fast that is onvertable to human readable and back seems like a really good idea.

Overwhelming feeling...

[GOD_ALMIGHTY]

of "I told you so!" coming over. Between all the people who jumped on the web services bandwagon without any clue how to handle distributed systems efficiently and the "OMG! It's human readable!" crowd, the architecture de jour has become a bloated PITA. Why this wasn't built into the spec in the first place alludes me. If we can use tools like ethereal to read those binary IP datagrams, why wouldn't the same concept be used for this standard? A standardized, compressed, data format with a standardized API for outputting plaintext (XML), would have allowed this system to be much more efficient.

Didn't anyone remember that text processing was bulky and expensive? Sometimes the tech community seems to share the same uncritical mind as people who order get-rich-quick schemes off late night infomercials. I doubt XML would have gotten out of the gate as is, had the community demanded these kinds of features from the get-go.

The article doesn't go far enough...

[Da VinMan]

It doesn't tell us what the specific performance problems are with XML. Does it take too long to transmit? Does it take too long to validate? Does it take too long to parse? Does it take too long to format? What's the real problem here?

From experience, I can state that using XML in any high performance situation is easy to screw up. But once you get past the basic mistakes at that level, what other inherent problems are there?

Oh, and just stating "well, the format is obviously wasteful" just because it's human readable (one of its primary, most useful, features) is NOT an answer.

I get the feeling that this perception of XML is being perpetuated by vendors who do not really want to open up their data formats. Allowing them to successfully propagate this impression would be a very real step backwards for all IT professionals.

Re:WHO NEEDS FREAKING READABILITY ?!

[dbacher]

I agree with your point, however there's one additional case where it is nice.

The best use for XML is at system or domain boundaries, where you cannot control the software on both sides.

For example, a support system might use file exchange to open support tickets in a vendors system for hardware failures. In this case, the vendor probably needs to deal with multiple different customers, and each of their customers might be dealing with several vendors.

Being able to encapsulate to XML, in this case, is valuable so that all partners can understand the data.

You could do this with a binary format, etc. but there is no binary format with the universal library support, and C doesn't guarauntee byte orders and structure layout between platforms, so in that case XML is useful.

That's the only time it's useful.

I strongly dislike using it for comms protocols, because the extensibility and transformation capabilities are lost, and it cripples throughput in the best of situations.