Fast Infoset

(or FI) is an international standard that specifies a binary encoding format for the XML Information Set (XML Infoset) as an alternative to the XML document format. It aims to provide more efficient serialization than the text-based XML format.

One can think of FI as gzip for XML, though FI aims to optimize both document size and processing performance, whereas gzip optimizes only the size. While the original formatting is lost, no information is lost in the conversion from XML to FI and back to XML.