- From: C. M. Sperberg-McQueen <cmsmcq@acm.org>
- Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 16:40:39 -0600
- To: "Charles Frankston" <cbf@isovia.com>
- Cc: W3C XML Schema Comments list <www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org>
At 2001-04-05 22:42, you wrote:
>There was a change made to the binary datatype back in January, between
>the Candidate Recommendation and the first Proposed Recommendation:
Charles -
in preparing for the director's decision on whether XML Schema
should go forward or not, it would be helpful to know whether
you are at all persuaded by the WG's response to your note on
the binary types.
Your argument, if I understood it right, was:
1 this exposes the lexical form of the binary blob to
downstream processors, which is bad
2 this forces schema authors to choose a particular notation
instead of just saying 'binary'
3 this requires all processors to support both encodings
The WG position (you have already seen Ashok Malhotra's
description; here's another) is
1 it would be bad, but since hexBinary and base64Binary
both have the set of bit strings as their value space,
and since downstream apps should normally have access
to the value, not just the lexical form, it should be
possible for downstream apps to ignore the lexical form
2 schema authors can define a 'binary' type as a union
of the hex and base64 types, so they can in fact
just say 'binary' if they wish
3 true, but neither encoding is really hard to support
Does this persuade you at all? Let us know. Thanks.
Michael
Received on Thursday, 19 April 2001 18:49:59 UTC