What is EXI, anyway?

All developers of today know XML, but then again, the language is quite verbose and thus not always suitable for communications. To address this, W3C is about to create a new stardard for packing XML data into a binary format called EXI. EXI stands for Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) Format 1.0.

Here's what W3C is saying: "EXI is a very compact representation for the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Information Set that is intended to simultaneously optimize performance and the utilization of computational resources. The EXI format uses a hybrid approach drawn from the information and formal language theories, plus practical techniques verified by measurements, for entropy encoding XML information."

Edit on March 14: good news! EXI has just been made a W3C Recommendation. Now it is just a matter of time before EXI files will start popping up on your hard drive, too.