Re: Embedded Content

Hi Liam,

Agreed that Base64 is valuable for \00 but any binary content that should
be embedded in the graph. However, the concern was that a system would
never use the base64 encoded value, if the content could be encoded as
plain text, and that text was also in the graph.

Or, to make a stronger assertion, there's no value to having base64 encoded
content when it could be included as plain [utf-8] text.

Rob


On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 8:34 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@w3.org> wrote:

> 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/
>



-- 
Rob Sanderson
Technology Collaboration Facilitator
Digital Library Systems and Services
Stanford, CA 94305