RE: DS3 and unipart vs. multipart

Frank,

You might find some of the discussion around AIUs ('abstract interface
units' needs a better name)in [1] interesting. It seems to me that we're
dealing questions of syntax and encoding here. It is perfectly possible to
encode multiple 'documents' or arbitrary binary data object within an XML
element. You could 'base64' them; you could escape an XML document with
'entity references ('<' becomes '&lt;' and '& becomes '&amp;'); subject to
certain constraints it might be a directly embeddable piece of XML.

It seems to me that intrinsically XP has to be capable of carrying
multi-part binary attachments. A binding to MIME-Multipart  over SMTP or
HTTP would take advantage of the intrinsic capability of MIME carry multipe
parts. A binding to something else might use a wholly XML encoding. Viewed
as a long stream of bytes (or unicode chars) the differences between
wrapping in MIME and designing an XP format capable of carrying attachments
seem to me to be more syntactic than functional.

Maybe I'm missing something.

Regards

Stuart
[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/1/01/18-adhoc-meeting.html

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Frank DeRose [mailto:frankd@tibco.com]
> Sent: 24 January 2001 23:22
> To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
> Subject: DS3 and unipart vs. multipart
> 
> 
> DS3 contains the following wording:
> 
> "The sending party packages one or more documents into a 
> request message
> which is then sent to the receiving party."
> 
> This usage scenario assumes that it will be possible to 
> package multiple
> documents into a single message. A multipart protocol could 
> handle multiple
> documents by definition. It's unclear how a unipart protocol 
> would package
> multiple documents.
> 
> F
>

Received on Thursday, 25 January 2001 04:26:59 UTC