So, the rose comes off XML more and more as people realize that, like anything, it can be abused. Make up your own tag names like 5.50 and you find that your data is far overwhelmed by your description. Who would do such a crazy thing?
Well, it seems like just about every program that saves its output into XML (whoops).
Read this to get the idea: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=99&tag=nl.e589. Yet again, Gzip and HTTP compression is up as a solution, and indeed we can attest that it will potentially shrink things quite dramatically. Of course, you are not in a binary form, which makes some XML purists shiver, especially the ones who seem to ignore all the binary XML formats work going on at the W3C (http://www.w3.org/XML/Binary/).
To jump into blame gaming and finger pointing fun about XML, Port80 will state our outrageous claim publicly:
"Comma delimited format is pretty small!"
There you have it, folks, export to CSV -- the past is the new future. Silliness aside, when playing with XML, even though compression will help, you really ought to think about your description-to-content ratio.
Cheers,
Port80ius