Fast Transform for Effective XML Compression

Abstract

The main drawback of the XML format seems to be its verbosity, a key problem especially in case of large documents. Therefore, efficient encoding of XML constitutes an important research issue. In this work, we describe a preprocessing transform meant to be used with popular LZ77-style compressors. We show experimentally that our transform, albeit quite simple, leads to better compression ratios than existing XML-aware compressors. Moreover, it offers high decoding speed, which often is of utmost priority.