4 ms·

Is this effectively a form of compression for data transfer?

• kstenerud 5y ago
  If you squint at it the right way, sure ;-) It's basically a binary format that has a 1:1 compatible text format. The idea is that everything stays in binary format (which is faster to process, more efficient, and smaller), and then convert the document to text only if/when a human needs to see it or edit the document. It could still be further compressed using a general purpose compressor like gzip, but the main purpose of the data format is to be easy for a machine to process compared to JSON/XML/etc, and tight in specification so that you don't end up with exploitable security holes due to implementation differences like you do with JSON/XML: https://labs.bishopfox.com/tech-blog/an-exploration-of-json-interoperability-vulnerabilities https://labs.bishopfox.com/tech-blog/an-exploration-of-json-...