Andrew-J2000 wrote:
d> create a model of the economics of transporting XML data via various
different communications media. The model should include some notion
of the tradeoff between the value human-readable tag names versus
terse tags which might shorten communications packets.
Ed, I'm not quite sure what you mean by the above? Care to elaborate?
Sure. The question that occasionally comes up here is about how to
reduce the size of XML so that the transportation of the data over a
network is quicker or cheaper. This is a legitimate engineering
concern, and one obvious way (among many) to do it is to reduce the tag
lengths. For example:
<BookCitation>
<AuthorName>
<Surname>Smith</Surname>
<FirstName>John</FirstName>
</AuthorName>
<BookTitle>Using XML</BookTitle>
</BookCitation>
I expect that it's probably quite clear from the tag names what this is
all about, and that clarity is worth something. However, the XML could
be compressed into something like this:
<c><a><s>Smith</s><f>John</f></a><t>Using XML</t></c>
The overhead due to XML tag lengths has been reduced, and this would
certainly reduce the length of the transmission over, say, a wireless
network, but we have all but destroyed the meaning of the tags.
The question, then, is "Under what circumstances and conditions is it
worthwhile to perform this type of tag compression?"
Ed