What is your goal? If your goal is to reduce the amount of data that goes across the wire, just make sure you have gzip enabled on your server - the compressio

What is your goal? If your goal is to reduce the amount of data that goes across the wire, just make sure you have gzip enabled on your server - the compression algorithm will take care of that for you. Otherwise (if you are trying to reduce memory usage), you probably want to split them out, as say "sub-items", and refer to them by name - but there's no magic / hidden feature that will do that for you. Of course doing this will make both the client and the server code more complex. In the majority of cases, I suspect most coders (myself included) would prefer the simpler code resulting from the former option - but it totally depends on your goal. Have you actually measured/profiled the code/data in question? I ask because this kinda smells of being a premature optimisation (although obviously one cannot truly say, without more context).