To allow for faster parsing and reading of the AIDA ASCII XML file all tags were translated all tags to binary codes and doubles (and other primtives) were written according to IEEE standards.
The translation from ASCII XML to Binary XML is ont-to-one, using WAP-192-WBXML-20010725-a, Version 1.3, 25 July 2001 binary XML format. This standard allows you to retrieve XML tags, XML attributes and OPAQUE data (primitives and arrays of primitives). The encoding also saves some space compared to ASCII (and still can be compressed using zlib compression).
Reading (parsing including avoidance of double conversion) is about 3 times faster than with ASCII XML. Writing is about 1.3 times faster (due to conversion and data volume) than ASCII XML.
For JAIDA we wrote our own parser and writer in Java. For C++ (and Python) these could be easily translated.
