3 ms·

Just as a thought exercise, if XML had been the de facto interchange format, how much would that have added to the historical bandwidth transfer of the Internet

by Andrex 3y ago

Just as a thought exercise, if XML had been the de facto interchange format, how much would that have added to the historical bandwidth transfer of the Internet? Even 1 KB added to every AJAX call would add up pretty significantly pretty fast, I'd imagine... Obviously JSON isn't well optimized either but I wonder how much, if any, progress might have been slowed by XML syntax clogging the pipes even more.

chriswarbo 3y ago
Resource requirements expand until it they hit a user-noticable limit. Even ultra-compressed every-bit-counts encodings[0] would be ignored and abused until they're bloated to a user-noticable limit. Or the extra bandwidth would be used for more video ads. > how much, if any, progress might have been slowed by XML syntax clogging the pipes even more. Depends what you mean by "progress", and if you think Web development has been improving or devolving over time. [0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/functional-pearl-every-bit-counts https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/functio...
zaik 3y ago
I feel like most web applications today make hundreds of HTTP requests when opening them. If that's acceptable, then XML vs. JSON doesn't matter.
_heimdall 3y ago
XML is definitely more verbose than JSON, though I'd be very surprised if an average content-heavy site would be smaller with something like JSON + react. I'd be surprised if server components tipped the scales either given that the server state would still be shipped as HTML and/or a virtual dom representation.
cryptonector 3y ago
FastInfoSet enters the chat I.e., you can have XML and have it be compact by serializing it to something very close to ASN.1's PER (packed encoding rules). Ditto for JSON, though there's lots of competing binary JSON schemes out there.
Thiez 3y ago
With compression a lot of the verboseness of XML disappears. And the vast majority of the data "clogging the pipes" is video and images.

by Andrex 3y ago

chriswarbo 3y ago

Resource requirements expand until it they hit a user-noticable limit. Even ultra-compressed every-bit-counts encodings[0] would be ignored and abused until they're bloated to a user-noticable limit. Or the extra bandwidth would be used for more video ads. > how much, if any, progress might have been slowed by XML syntax clogging the pipes even more. Depends what you mean by "progress", and if you think Web development has been improving or devolving over time. [0]https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/functional-pearl-every-bit-counts https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/functio...

zaik 3y ago

I feel like most web applications today make hundreds of HTTP requests when opening them. If that's acceptable, then XML vs. JSON doesn't matter.

_heimdall 3y ago

XML is definitely more verbose than JSON, though I'd be very surprised if an average content-heavy site would be smaller with something like JSON + react. I'd be surprised if server components tipped the scales either given that the server state would still be shipped as HTML and/or a virtual dom representation.

cryptonector 3y ago

FastInfoSet enters the chat I.e., you can have XML and have it be compact by serializing it to something very close to ASN.1's PER (packed encoding rules). Ditto for JSON, though there's lots of competing binary JSON schemes out there.

Thiez 3y ago

With compression a lot of the verboseness of XML disappears. And the vast majority of the data "clogging the pipes" is video and images.