The search giant didn’t spit out any insults, and it didn’t demand that everyone follow in its footsteps, either. Still, it may be of interest to XML fans that, when faced with the problem of encoding a lot of data, Google will now be using an XML alternative called Protocol Buffers.

“As nice as XML is, it isn’t going to be efficient enough for this scale,” wrote Kenton Varda on the Google Open Source Blog. “When all of your machines and network links are running at capacity, XML is an extremely expensive proposition. Not to mention, writing code to work with the DOM tree can sometimes become unwieldy.”
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