Binary alternatives to XML encoding

XML has become widely adopted as a means of encoding hierarchical self-describing data both for storage and also for communication between systems. As the application of XML has broadened it has become apparent that it has some serious limitation especially when used to encode binary data. Various industry groups and researchers have examined ways to improve XML both generally and when used to encode binary information. This research examines binary encodings as alternatives to XML for both data storage and communications and shows that improvements in both encoded data size and CPU time are possible with no loss of information or ease of use.;In every case tested, the binary protocol encodings performed much better than the XML protocol encoding. All of the binary implementations performed better than XML and they all performed better for every data type tested. The improvement in individual performance measurements vaned from about four times to more than a thousand times in one specific case. Of the three binary encodings tested, ASN.1 DER shows clear advantages over the other encodings and clearly offers an alternative to XML where encoded data size and CPU overhead are important especially when the data content is partially or exclusively binary.