Table Vs Xml / Json / Yaml - Table Requires Less Storage If Data Is Any Related? More Efficient Than Compression

To add a field to a XML object it takes the length of the fieldname + 3 characters (or 7 when nested) and for JSON 4 (or 6 when nested) xml xml='xml'

Solution 1:

The CSV in your example is quite inefficient use of 8 bit encoding. You're hardly even using 5 bits of entropy, clearly wasting 3 bits. Why not compress it?

The answer to all of these is people make mistakes, and stronger typing trades efficiency for safety. It is impossible for machine or human to identify a transposed column in a CSV stream, however both JSON & XML would automatically handle it, and (assuming no hierarchy boundaries got crossed) everything would still work. 30 years ago when storage space was scarce & instructions per second were sometimes measured 100s per second, using minimal amounts of decoration in protocols made sense. These days even embedded systems have relatively vast amounts of power & storage, thus the tradeoff for a little extra safety is much easier to make.

For tightly controlled data transfer, say between modules that my development team is working on, JSON works great. But when data needs to go between different groups, I strongly prefer XML, simply because it helps both sides understand what is happening. If the data needs to go across a "slow" pipe, compression will remove 98% of the XML "overhead".

Solution 2:

The designers of XML were well aware that there was a high level of redundancy in the representation, and they considered this a good thing (I'm not saying they were right). Essentially (a) redundancy costs nothing if you use data compression, (b) redundancy (within limits) helps human readability, and (c ) redundancy makes it easier to detect and diagnose errors, especially important when XML is being hand-authored.