“When I started this blog questioning the wisdom of XML, it
started a storm of comments and was followed up by fellow bloggers
John Carroll and Joe McKendrick. Since my response ‘Proof that XML
is extremely bloated’ appeared last week, I got a lot of talkback
complaining that I was only testing Microsoft Excel and not Open
Office Calc. ZDNet reader Yagotta B. Kidding took it upon himself
to do some testing with Open Office but he stopped testing when he
reached a file half the size of my 16-sheet XML file, yet his
results were even slower than my Excel results. I requested that
Kidding provide the results for the identical 16-sheet file, but he
declined and wouldn’t provide a specific reason. This, of course,
sparked my curiosity, so I did some additional research…”