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by breck 2522 days ago
> The more levels of nesting you have in the Tree Notation file, the more of the file's space is ... well white space characters. JSON doesn't have this problem, as spaces are not crucial to the structure of the data.

This is a good thought, and a theoretical problem I used to think about, but in practice it hasn't really come up. In practice what has happened, is that anytime things started getting deeply nested, it was a sign that the Tree Language should be refactored so things could be made flatter.

> This means that although there's less characters, you cannot minify the Tree Notation, like you can with JSON (as indentation is crucial for representation in the tree)

The other thing to keep in mind that JSON is almost always GZIPPED before it is actually sent over the wire, and the compression characteristics of zipping/minifying TN are as good (if not better--I hope someone some day will do the research here), than JSON.

1 comments

Interesting, I hadn't considered GZipping, that probably would be much smaller than JSON in that case. Maybe Tree Notation has a chance after all.