Compressing SVG with EXI

EXI is a binary format for encoding XML Infosets. It is currently in Candidate Recommendation, one of the last steps of the W3C standardization process. The main goal of this format is to provide very good compaction for a wide range of XML documents, applications and devices. To meet this goal, several encoding options are defined within the EXI format. Those encoding options must be selected with care to meet the requirements of an application in terms of compression, processing efficiency and memory usage. This study describes the possibilities and achievements obtained by the EXI format for SVG applications. The impacts of the encoding options, in particular schema-less and schema-informed encoding (i.e. whether schema information is available) and compression (i.e. a further generic compression step is applied on the encoded data) are evaluated in this context.