Glossary
EXI
Efficient XML Interchange (EXI) is a W3C standard that encodes XML in a compact binary form.
Context
EXI works in two modes. Without a schema it still compacts the document. With a schema, in schema-informed mode, sender and receiver already know which elements can appear and in what order, so the tags need not be sent at all and values can be stored as their real types. The price is that both ends must hold exactly the same schema version. EXI vs gzip has the numbers.
How Gridnorth handles it
In our evaluation, mean message size fell from 328 bytes as plain XML to 19 bytes with schema-informed EXI, and every message decoded back without loss.
Last reviewed September 29, 2026