On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Jean-Marc Vanel wrote:

And now the figures about the "verbosity" of XML:

My XML example (a single plant species from the flora of China) compresses from 2500 bytes to 1090 (57%): http://jmvanel.free.fr/Samples/DisplayDescriptions/species_example.xml

An Xdelta example (Lepidoptera) on Leigh Dodds' site compresses from 50500 bytes to 3600 (93%), because it has a large number of repeted tags.

I used winzip.

Now we see that we can have all plant species on a CD (650 Mb), even without compression: 2500 bytes * 250 000 species = 625 Mb

And on a DVD you can have 10 times more! And also on Internet with the new HTTP 1.1 protocol, the files can be compressed during transmission. Still 2 more arguments: the verbose repeted tags are not repeted when the XML file has been parsed and is in memory; the last argument is financial: today you can buy a 10 000 Mega-bytes disk for 200 US$ , and it will decrease.

So file size is NO problem for taxonomy with XML. You must understand that it's the small price to pay for extensibility and interoperability.

Agreed. In some cases large file size does present a problem though.

Example 1: NaviKey is a Java applet that has to do the following: - download data - parse data - interact with user

If the data are uncompressed XML files, then download time is obviously a major problem. If the XML is compressed, there is still the added time involved in compressing/uncompressing data, as well as new memory considerations.

Example 2: Say I want to run NaviKey on my Palm Pilot*. The device has limited resources and I would prefer to use very small files if at all possible.

As you say, these problems will all go away someday.

Best,

-Noel Cross

*I only wish it were possible -- A few people have actually asked for this capability, as it would be handy to use such as program in the field.