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> EXI, a new way to transfer XML documents; instead of encoding it into an ASCII representation and gzipping it, it instead (iirc) turns an XML document into a binary representation or stream containing events similar to SAX as mentioned in this article. That could then be reshuffled and compressed for further efficiency

How would this compare to protobuf, in terms of efficiency?

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I don't think anyone's tried benchmarking protobuf against EXI yet, but I've played around with a .NET implementation (Nagasena: http://openexi.sourceforge.net/) and it does outperform Gzip both for compression efficiency and decompression/runtime performance, so long as you use a schema-accelerated parser. It can infer a schema (turning it into a 'grammar' to use the EXI-specific term), but a properly constructed XML Schema will always be fastest/most efficient, especially in low memory systems.

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