Effective XML: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your XML

Item 36. Serialize XML with XML

XML is itself a fairly efficient serialization format. There's no need or reason to use expensive binary object serialization on XML documents. Even custom-designed binary formats are generally larger, slower, and less robust than XML's plain text formats. (See Item 50.) Generic binary formats like Java's object serialization are much worse. It is much simpler, faster, and more effective to just write the text of the XML document onto a stream or into a string.

For example, I wrote a simple program to load the XML 1.0 specification into a JDOM document object and write it out again as both XML and a serialized object. The binary format was 537,480 bytes long. The original XML document was only 201,918 bytes. Including ...