- From: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
- Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1999 12:36:12 +0100
- To: discuss@apps.ietf.org
At 04.18 +0100 99-02-20, Chris Newman wrote: > I should also point out the option of a hybrid encoding. Use a simple > binary structure with fixed-length ASCII character strings for protocol > keywords. You get all the advantages of binary encoding, and a protocol > dump is at least partially useful. Secure Shell 2 has a different > interesting hybrid characteristic -- it uses length-counted text strings > for extensibility-oriented feature lists. A nice idea. Is it common in standards? Binary data in textual encodings seems to be a problem. How is this usually handled? Base64 is of course an option. MIME uses, if I understand it rightly, the convention that <CRLF>--boundary text<CRLF> is end marker of a binary body part. Not very neat. I have looked at the XML specs, and not found any good way of putting binary data into XML either. Have I missed something? To indicate the end of binary data with an octet-length value before the binary data seems to me the neatest way, but it seems not to be very popular in standards. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se> (Stockholm University and KTH) for more info see URL: http://www.dsv.su.se/~jpalme
Received on Saturday, 20 February 1999 11:55:10 UTC