4.4 Compression

For the OLE archives, we compressed the document by applying gzip to the OLE archive. For the XML format, which uses several files, we compressed each file separately. This strategy emulates the potential benefits of a network infrastructure with built-in compression.

The results of these experiments are shown in table 3 and figures 5, 6, and 7. Compression has a dramatic effect on reducing the size of both OLE archives and XML files, achieving savings as high as 77% for the OLE and 90% for XML. Moreover, the difference in size between compressed OLE and compressed XML representations is small enough to be insignificant. This implies that neither representation has an inherent bandwidth advantage when used across a network.