Re: Microsoft XML File formats for Office Suite & Binary XML

Hi Noah,

noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:
> Anyway, I mention all this because it seems to bear at least indirectly on 
> the Binary XML discussion.  At least one major vendor will be using zip'd 
> XML to achieve compression.

To be honest I think the bearing is very indirect, if there is any 
bearing at all. Small to medium Office documents as are the target of 
these applications are the poster child of document types that should be 
expressed in XML, and the fact that they weren't already was an 
anachronism that I'm sure I'm not the only one to celebrate the 
progressive death of.

I am not in the least surprised that zipping Office XML documents makes 
them slower than the binary formats they used to be encoded in. In fact, 
given even superficial knowledge of said binary format, I would have 
been shocked if that weren't the case. To be kind, it simply wasn't very 
good, and it's common lore that the people in charge of the Office file 
formats at Microsoft don't know what some parts of the formats are there 
for.

I don't think we need to crowd the issue with a mention of the many XML 
formats that are happily in XML and use generic compression when needed :)

-- 
Robin Berjon
   Senior Research Scientist
   Expway, http://expway.com/

Received on Thursday, 30 June 2005 01:32:46 UTC