Re: SD1 - Short End Tags - minimising data _with_ end tags

Andrew:

On May 16,  6:40pm, Andrew Layman wrote:
> Subject: RE: SD1 - Short End Tags
>
> Where they do become important is when XML is machine-generated as a
> transport protocol by an automated process. For example, it is very
> important to me to consider using XML as a format for getting results
> back from database queries. They might be financial records, electronic
> commerce records, purchase orders, etc. These are neither written by
> humans nor meant to be read by humans. In many of these cases, the
> volume of data is large, but is mainly short fields, so the overhead of
> lengthy tags is pretty high relative to the basic data. I'm getting a
> lot of pushback from database people regarding this point. They are very
> concerned that we make it possible for them to be more economical in
> their encoding. Accomodating their needs means opening up a whole
> additional category of XML user.
>
>
>-- End of excerpt from Andrew Layman

If these are only leaves with relatively short character strings, why can't the
data be stuck as attribute values of empty tags?  I.e.,

<name v="Andrew Layman"/><position v="XML dataslinger"/>

instead of

<name>Andrew Layman</><position>XML dataslinger</>

This has a fixed cost of 3 characters per tag over empty tags and doesn't
require changing the current spec.  (Note: this could be attacked as a kluge,
but I think it does the job.)

Matthew Fuchs
matt@wdi.disney.com

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