Blogs @ EDI Sourcing Inc

The evolution of “Binary XML”

Using a binary XML format generally reduces the size of XML documents and cost of parsing. It aims to provide more efficient serialization than the text-based XML format. One of the popular opensource platforms “GlassFish” by Sun uses a variation of Binary XML called “Fast Infoset”, which is often described as “gzip” for xml with the additional benefit of processing performance.  The Fast Infoset standard is made available here in pdf from ITU – X.891 Specification.

Some of the advantages of using a Binary XML notation are:

• enabling random access
• indexing of XML documents
• efficient storage and processing functionality

Some of the dis-advantages are:

• hinders the use of ordinary text editors to view and edit the document