Fast Infoset (FI)

Definition - What does Fast Infoset (FI) mean?

Fast Infoset (FI) is an international standard that details a binary-encoding information format as an Extensible Markup Language (XML) alternative. FI is engineered to support optimized serialization more efficiently than XML, which is based on text.

FI is officially known as International Telecommunications Standard Sector (ITU-T) Rec. X.891 and International Standard for Organization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 24824-1.

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Techopedia explains Fast Infoset (FI)

According to the FI standard, a data model is specified with the following components:

Document information
Document format/type declaration items
Character-related information
Notation-related information
Namespace-related information
Element-related information
Attribute information items
Processing instruction information
Unexpanded entity reference information
Comment information
Unparsed entity information

FI may be viewed as an XML gzip, even in cases where FI optimizes document size and computer resource usage. Like gzip, no information is lost during XML/FI conversion.