Various techniques are described hereafter for improving the efficiency of binary XML encoding and loading operations. In particular, techniques are described for incrementally encoding XML in response to amount-based requests. After encoding enough binary XML to satisfy an amount-based request, the encoder stops encoding the XML until a subsequent request is received. The incremental encoding may take place on the client-side or the server-side. Techniques are also described for reducing the character set conversion operations by having a parser convert tokens in text XML into one character set while converting non-token text in the text XML into another character set. Techniques are also described for generating self-contained binary XML documents, and for improving remap operations by providing a binary XML document on a chunk-by-chunk basis.