Of course it would be fastest if you just stored in binary like:
1A
Where the number 1 represents material "blah" and the letter A represents property fooz. It would only take 2 bytes of space vs. 54 bytes of XML which also requires more processing. Binary is not really an issue as long as the specification is made public or sometimes for like say a dictionary there is really no need for a specification.
I just think XML is overhyped, I got tons of programs that store and retrieve data just fine without XML and they probably work faster for it.
1A
Where the number 1 represents material "blah" and the letter A represents property fooz. It would only take 2 bytes of space vs. 54 bytes of XML which also requires more processing. Binary is not really an issue as long as the specification is made public or sometimes for like say a dictionary there is really no need for a specification.
I just think XML is overhyped, I got tons of programs that store and retrieve data just fine without XML and they probably work faster for it.