Thanks to both of you for your responses.
Scott, your explanation and example helped me to understand that the four-fold increase in message sizes will only become a performance issue depending on the volume of transactions.
In fairness to one of the programmers, I’ll mention that he responded by saying:
His XML example is “element” based and that’s not the only way you can represent data. There is also “attribute” based XML, something like: FirstName=”fname” LastName=”lname” MiddleName=”mname”, which cuts the number of characters by 3rd.
