XML-binary Optimized Packaging
XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP) is a mechanism defined for the serialization of XML Information Sets (infosets) that contain binary data, as well as deserialization back into the XML Information Set. Benefits XOP allows the binary data part of an XML Infoset to be serialized without going through the XML serializer. The XML serialization of an XML Infoset is text based, so any binary data will need to be encoded using base64. Using XOP avoids this by extracting the binary data out of the XML Infoset so that the XML Infoset does not contain binary data and the binary data can be serialized differently. Therefore, XOP can reduce the size of the serialization (since base64 encoding has approximately a 33% size overhead) and (depending on how it is implemented) might allow processing efficiencies. This size increase results in extra resources needed to transmit or store the data. Costs XOP introduces another level of processing. Therefore, it introduces extra complexity and processing overheads. The representation of the XOP packages introduces some overhead. These are negligible when the binary data is large, but could be significant if the binary data is small. Operation XOP operates on a single XML Infoset. The binary parts