XML is a text markup format designed for clarity and ease of use, without concern for conciseness. Because of these design choices, text XML can be costly in terms of both document size and processing overhead. Part 1 of this two-part article shows you some of the issues involved in alternative non-text representations of XML, and covers a few of the approaches being developed for this purpose; Part 2 will add some actual performance measurements so you can get a feel for the level of improvements possible. read the article