Re: Embedded Content

On Tue, 14 Oct 2014 09:08:54 -0700
Robert Sanderson <azaroth42@gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Stian,
> [...]
> My concerns with both representations at once are:
> 
> 1. What is a system is supposed to do when they're different?
> 2. When would a system ever use the Base64 version when they have the
> decoded characters already?

Base64 is needed when systems can't represent arbitrary binary data directly. For example, XML doesn't allow control characters (depending on XML version) and never allows NUL (character zero), originally because C and C++ systems had to use non-native string handling if you allowed that, but also because it had security implications. If you use RDF/XML (ugh) you would want to encode only the specific properties that had illegal characters in them, and there's no way to encode NUL natively in XML, e.g. &#x0000; isn't allowed.

(not responding to the rest as RDF is all too complicated for me :-) )

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/

Received on Saturday, 18 October 2014 03:35:02 UTC