RE: Off-Topic: Is there any standard compressed ASCII format for vali d XML documents?

[Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen <TR...@stibo.dk>]

> Is there any "standard" format for compressing XML files?
> I know that I could use GNU zip or so, but what I need is a simple (to
> compress and to uncompress) compression that produces ASCII format.

> If there is no standard, I'd propose a very simple solution.

Your solution means that it will not be valid XML anymore.  XML was deliberately designed to be verbose and readable instead of compact.

> Background:
> A web server and a RDBMS are communicating over a 64k link,
> the link is shared with other application, so there is very 
> low bandwidth.
> The RDBMS produces data in XML, the web server (i.e. Cocoon) 
> uses style
> sheets
> to pretty-format everything.
> The RDBMS could produce data in ASCII-compressed XML in order 
> to use less
> bandwidth, a modified DOM or SAX parser that consumes 
> compressed XML should
> be easy to implement.

What is wrong with your own suggestion of using gzip or so?  If you need plain ascii then use the MIME::Base64 encoding to get it.

I have large, highly redundant XML files.  Gzip can compress to 1.5% of the original size, and bzip2 can compress to 0.5% of the original size  (you would probably get less).

Another approach is building a virtual private network between the two endpoints and enable compression in _that_.   That is easily done with ssh between two Unix-machines, and allow you to keep your software base unmodified.

Best regards,
-- 
  Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen   "...and...Tubular Bells!"