Miguel de Icaza writes about binary encoding for XML (Omri’s page was unavailable, so I can’t comment on that). This is already in widespread usage, a la WBXML. It’s a pretty successful standard, given that it targets low bandwidth mobile phones they’ve obviously encoded for size, a fact made easier that it also targets a specific schema. I.e. it’s not a generic XML encoding.

Omri’s thesis is that there are multiple things that you might want to optimize for: size, parsing speed and overhead for generating the data and that it is not possible to define a file format that satisfies all of those different needs.

Well, I thought we had already done this with XML. The fact is, you can already use your own favourite encoding. If I want to make it easy to parse then I can use UTF32, if I want to be ‘more standard’ I can use UTF8. I’m not sure about this (I need to check the spec) but in theory you should be able to use any encoding that you want to, as long as all parties agree on it.