Is it a good idea to use XML for formatting data in communication ?

Question

Hi, I was going to use XML for communicating some data betwwen my server and the client, then I saw few articles saying using XML at any occation may not be the best idea. The reason given was using XML would increase the size of my message which is quite true, specially for me where nost of my messages are very short ones.

Is it a good idea to send several information segements seperated by a new line? (maximum diffenernt types of data that one message may have is 3 or 4) Or what are the alternative methods that I should look in to.

I have diffenrent types of messages. Ex: one message may contain username and password and the next message may have current location and speed. I'll be using apache server and php.

Thank you

Answer 1

Separating your information segments by newlines could be problematic if your information segments might ever need to include newlines.

JSON is a much lighter weight alternative to XML, and lots of software that supports XML often supports JSON as an alternative. It's pretty easy to use. Since your messages are short, it sounds like they would benefit from using JSON over XML.

http://json.org/

Answer 2

Serializing data in an XML format can certainly have the negative side effect of bloating it a little (the angle bracket tax), but the incredible extensibility of XML greatly outweighs that consequence, IMO. Also, you can serialize XML in a binary format which greatly cuts down on size, and in most cases the additional bloat would be negligible.