Compress the XML before transmission? Wrong.
Why? Unless the document is large, typical compresion algorithms
(eg gzip) actually make the data bigger. And
lots of CPU power is needed at the receiver to decompress.
Answer #2:
Ignore the problem. Unfortunately this is wrong too. The
problem is that in XML the recipient is required to "parse" (a slightly different meaning of the word than
previous) the document to extract information. This can be
compared to the traditional RPC approach where the RPC libraries
map information directly to "internal" data structures. Parsing is
a heavy consumer of CPU, and hence battery power. Note that there
isn't universal agreement on this point!
Answer #3
Invent a standardised way of converting an XML entity into a
new (compact) form for transmission. The XML Binary group is working on
this possibility.
Answer #4
Use an existing compact binary encoding, of
which the best known and understood is probably ASN.1/BER!
Lecture 24: Data
Formats and Encoding -- A Philosophy Lecture