RE: Representation header

> -----Original Message-----
> From: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org [mailto:xml-dist-app-request@w3.org]
On
> Behalf Of Mark Nottingham
> Sent: Thursday, November 06, 2003 9:33 AM
> To: Anish Karmarkar
> Cc: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com; Xml-Dist-App@W3. Org
> Subject: Re: Representation header
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 5, 2003, at 12:17 AM, Anish Karmarkar wrote:
> 
> >> * content encoding - should we have a separate piece of metadata
that
> >> talks about the encoding? In MIME, that's
Content-Transfer-Encoding;
> >> in HTTP it's content-coding. If we don't do this, it bakes base64
in
> >> as the only option ever (because it's implicit), so it may be
> >> beneficial to specify something like
> >
> > I am not sure I understand, aren't the contents of the EII always
> > base64Binary?
> 
> I was actually toying with the idea of having a relationship between
> the headers in the XML and the headers in MIME, but I've become
> convinced that this isn't necessary (and actually would be a bad
> thing).


I agree that this would be a bad thing. 


> I think we should consider, however, that some Representations that
> people want to convey with messages may not be base64 encoded. The
main
> use case I can think of would be text-based formats like CSS; it seems
> extremely un-human-friendly to require these to be base64 encoded when
> doing so doesn't provide any benefit.
> 

One simple way to deal with this would be to declare the children of the
representation header to be xs:anySimpleType and use the xsi:type
attribute to declare whether the content is binary or text.

Of course, given that the base MIME type system only relies on text and
binary, that might be overkill if our goal is simply to subsume MIME
functionality.

DB

Received on Tuesday, 25 November 2003 14:41:33 UTC