[GeoJSON] <religious-war>size matters</religious-war>

[Allan Doyle]

You point out an interesting perspective, and it's good to know about  
these things.

However, perhaps we should assume that the GeoJSON community (of 3-4  
people but growing astronomically as we speak) is already convinced  
that a JSON implementation of something Geo is a worthwhile  
experiment. So I'm not sure this qualifies as a religious war.

Some of us might dislike XML as a transport for reasons of our own...  
either entirely (religiously) or under specific circumstances  
(pragmatically) or both.

	Allan

On Mar 15, 2007, at 11:28, Geoff Hendrey wrote:

> Here is some interesting background/debunking on the myth of JSON  
> compactness vs. XML verbosity.
> This is an excerpt from an email I sent to a colleague early last  
> year:
> ====================================================================== 
> =========
>
> I went to the json "see for yourself" page: http://www.json.org/ 
> example.html to compare the Json equivalent of XML.
>
> I copied each of the examples into notepad and wrote down the size- 
> on disk:
>
> json size (bytes)           XML size (bytes)          (json size)/ 
> (XML size)
> ===================================================
> 604                             630                               95%
> 252                             221                              114%
> 630                             656                              96%
> 3554                        10708                              33%
> 898                            1150                             78%
>
> AVG (json size)/(XML size)
> =====================
> 83.2%
>
>
> Based on an average size compaction to 83.2% of the XML size. Also,  
> if you look at the 4th example they give (line 4 of the table  
> above), they did a Json version of web.xml. Now web.xml is a  
> notoriously bad XML design. It basically doesn't use ANY  
> attributes, so you get pretty nasty tag bloat. So if we drop the  
> 4th comparison, as being kinda silly, we get an average compaction  
> to 95.4% of the original size. Is saving 4.5% really a big advantage?
>
> I also saw several statements on the json web page that I would put  
> in the "wacky" bin. This may just be personal preference, but I  
> found the XML documents much easier to read than their json  
> equivalents. The Json looks, to me, like "code", kinda like a  
> snippet of PERL or something.
>
> <geeky>
> Anyway, it seems clear that being able to easily marshal an object  
> representation of your data makes it much easier to develop  
> software in any programming language. But it seems to me that json  
> is munging this idea up with the wire format, which to me are  
> orthogonal concerns.
> </geeky>
>
> Geoff Hendrey
>
> Software Architect
> deCarta
> Four North Second Street, Suite 950
> San Jose, CA  95113
> office 408.625.3522
> www.decarta.com
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle at eogeo.org