In designing a new system, which will need to pass large data objects
cross-platform ( to AIX / Java), we have met resistence when proposing XML
formatting for these objects. A number of people have been quick to say
that XML format will slow the network transfer, because the addition of XML
tags will double the size of the data to transfer, and thus XML should not
be used anywhere in the system. Is the performance issue necessarily true?
or does something in the .NET runtime or OS perform compression on the XML
when it is stored or transfered? Is such compression available? Is it
cross-platform compatible? Would such a compression concept completely
negate the self-describing nature of XML? Thanks for any ideas on a
response to these XML nay-sayers.