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EXI Comparisions. EXI. Emerging W3C standard, now in “final call” status on the standards track http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/ Provides a more efficient, alternate way to encode the XML infoset. • Relaxes XML requirement for text-only
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EXI • Emerging W3C standard, now in “final call” status on the standards track • http://www.w3.org/XML/EXI/ • Provides a more efficient, alternate way to encode the XML infoset. • • Relaxes XML requirement for text-only • • Can use schema information (if present) to encode XML document data more efficiently • • Can also work (less optimally) without a schema
EXI & Military • This has big implications for the military • • We want XML for data interoperability • • But XML is too verbose to use on many military networks • • Poor string databinding characteristics push implementers to use custom binary protocols • • Which results in silos of exellence, and nobody able to use the anyone else’s data without a lot of custom programming
EXI • Measures of Effectiveness: • • Document size • • Databinding performance • The first is obvious: we want to use XML everywhere, but the documents can be too big. EXI can make documents smaller, while being exactly equivalent to the original XML • The second less so: we want to be able to efficiently get data from the document to a programming language, such as Java, C++, Python, etc. • The second is a hard problem to measure; all sorts of measures of effectiveness
XML & Gzip • Why not just gzip XML? • • Doesn’t solve databinding issue at all • • For many XML documents with numeric data & a schema, EXI is more compact
Size Comparison • • The Gzipped data has the inherent problems of databinding string data • • The IEEE binary format is understood only by DIS-savvy applications • • The EXI schema-informed format is smaller than the original binary IEEE format, but at the cost of somewhat higher parsing complexity • • The schema-less EXI format is fairly competitive with gzip (results vary depending on the nature of the data)