Efficient XML Interchange Measurements Note

This Working Group Note presents measurement results of various high-performance XML interchange encoding formats and their associated processors, made by the Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Working Group. The measurements have been conducted following the recommendations of the XML Binary Characterization (XBC) Working Group. In particular, this draft covers measurements of the properties of "compactness", "processing efficiency" and "roundtrip support", as defined by the XBC WG. We start by describing the context in which this analysis is being made, and the position of an efficient format in the landscape of high performance XML strategies. Then we describe the measured quantities in detail and the test framework in which they were made, and give a short description of each format. Finally, a summary of the results and the conclusions of the group are included. The full measurements and analysis are included in an appendix and supporting documents. As a result of the measurements described here, the working group selected "Efficient XML" to be the basis for the proposed encoding specification to be prepared as a candidate W3C Recommendation. Follow up work has centered around integrating some features from the other measured format technologies, particularly variations for both more efficient structural and value encodings.