RE: Binary attachments to XP

The issue of interleaving binary data has come up in several projects that I
am involved in.  They all relate  to a printer receiving data that includes
text and images. The multipart/related solution is a reasonable solution for
the time being. But for any size of printer, there will always be documents
that will fail to print with multipart/related because they require too much
internal memory to print. There are even cases where two side by side images
need to be interleaved.
 
I agree with others who are suggesting that we need a mechanism for
interleaving multiple streams of data. Perhaps we need a new MIME media type
of "interleaved/related" or "multipart/interleaved", depending on how far we
want to deviate from existing practice.
 
Bob Herriot

-----Original Message-----
From: Mark A. Jones [mailto:jones@research.att.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 25, 2001 6:31 AM
To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
Subject: RE: Binary attachments to XP



RE: Binary attachments to XP 

Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 01:46:25 -0500 (EST) 
From: "Larry Masinter" <LMM@acm.org> 
To: "Frank DeRose" <frankd@tibco.com>, "Mark A. Jones"
<jones@research.att.com> 
Cc: <xml-dist-app@w3.org> 
Message-ID: <NDBBKEBDLFENBJCGFOIJIENHEEAA.LMM@acm.org> 
Subject: RE: Binary attachments to XP 


For some applications, MIME multipart is not adequate, because it makes 
it necessary that both the sender and the receiver be able to buffer 
arbitrary amounts of data. 


There's a reason why web clients open multiple HTTP connections. 
And while one can imagine GET transactions being multiplexed over 
multiple connections, there's no way to use multiple connections 
to POST multiple parts of the same request. 


Either you need a bi-directional multiplexing protocol (e.g., BXXP), 
or else some kind of packaging that allows interleaving of chunks of 
parts (e.g., that would allow you to send the embedded image data in 
chunks in between two chunks of XML data. 
 

Larry, 

I have thought a bit about these same issues and I agree that there are
cases 
that seem to require an interleaving of chunks of data and XML data to avoid

buffering arbitrary amounts of data.  We also have draft scenarios in which
we 
want to support fire-and-forget types of clients, so interleaving would be
preferable 
to the BXXP-style solution.  Since we also seem to be chartered to use
existing 
solutions, do you know of any? 


Mark A. Jones 
AT&T Labs - Research 
Shannon Laboratory 
Room A201 
180 Park Ave. 
Florham Park, NJ  07932-0971 


email: jones@research.att.com 
phone: (973) 360-8326 
  fax: (973) 360-8970

Received on Thursday, 25 January 2001 18:30:18 UTC