Re: Proposal for encoding a resource with properties

Jim Whitehead wrote:

> It seems to me to be a bad idea to submit a resource by reference, since it
> requires the server to receive the reference, then go and perform another
> network request to try and get the value of the resource.  [...]

Oops.  Yeah, that would be a problem.  I just left it in there because it
seemed like a nice theoretical win that fell out of the decision to use
multipart/related and cid: URIs.

> Beyond the problems with passing a reference, there is the issue of encoding
> arbitrary binary information inside an XML element, which is difficult to do
> in XML.

Uh...I didn't think I mentioned putting binary information in the XML.
I mentioned embedding the body of the resource into the XML, *if* the resource
was itself XML.

> As a result, I think the best way to encode a resource in a MIME message is
> to put the body in one MIME chunk, and the properties in another chunk, and
> send it together as an appropriate multipart/ type.

Hmm.  That's a good alternative, yeah.

--
/=============================================================\
|John Stracke    | My opinions are my own | S/MIME & HTML OK  |
|francis@ecal.com|============================================|
|Chief Scientist | NT's lack of reliability is only surpassed |
|eCal Corp.      |  by its lack of scalability. -- John Kirch |
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Received on Thursday, 11 March 1999 15:01:36 UTC