Re: Opaque data, XML, and SOAP

Don,

   Your note is nicely written and in one critical regard I agree with you 
100%:
binary data is not a SOAP issue but an issue for XML to solve generally.

    Extending XInclude as the way to specify the connection between XML and
binary data would be close to SwA.  That is, an XML document using XInclude
would look quite a bit like the SwA XML. If extending XInclude makes a
specification easier, great, but I don't see that it changes the problem 
all that
much.

    Specifically you still have to come up with a wire format 
standard.  You say that you
can have "multiple serialization formats, effectively unifying multiple 
messaging technologies",
but that cannot be true.  Multiple serialization formats means fragmentation in
an open system, not unification.  W3C has to pick one, not punt.

    And I cannot understand what possible value one can derive from you 
last point:
"Finally (and perhaps most importantly), ALL SOAP messages can be 
represented in
pure text".  What does "pure text" mean?  16 bit Unicode?  So what? Is this any
more significant than saying its "pure binary"? If I attach an image to a 
SOAP message
and send it to you, what pure-text processing can you do to the mixed message?

   I want to reiterate that the application developer will see a unified 
DOM no matter
what is done with XML/binary mixing at the messaging layer. The API they use
will have do deal with binary because the bits are not text.

John.




At 10:45 PM 2/26/2003 -0800, Don Box wrote:

>A few of us have spent some time thinking about the problem space and 
>wrote the down our thoughts in this area:
>
>http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2003/02/26/binaryxml.html
>
>DB
>

______________________________________________________
John J. Barton          email:  John_Barton@hpl.hp.com
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/John_Barton/index.htm
MS 1U-17  Hewlett-Packard Labs
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Received on Thursday, 27 February 2003 16:39:12 UTC