XML has grown into a widely used and highly developed technology, due in part to the subcomponents built around the technology (advanced parsers, frameworks, libraries, etc). The use of XML reduces development time and increases the robustness of distributed applications. Due to these advantages, a large and growing range of distributed applications, such as Web-services, use XML as the basic unit of communication. This paper surveys the topic of XML compression and proposes a new method that uses schema information for the compression algorithm. The schema provides valuable information to the compressor by specifying the data type and format of each element in the XML document. For example, if the compressor knows that a portion of data is numeric, it can intelligently save it using a binary representation instead of trying to compress the string representation.
