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. FI is effectively a lossless compression, analogous to gzip, for XML, except that while the original formatting is lost, no information is lost in the conversion from XML to FI, and back to XML. While the purpose of compression is to reduce physical data size, FI aims to optimize both document size and processing performance.