RE: Opaque data, XML, and SOAP

> All we'd need is a "binary" rather than "base64binary" that did not
> apply base64 to the data.  The base64 bit is only useful for email.

Well, it's not as simple as just no encoding -- you still have to deal
with the delimeter problem, right? If your binary data contains
"</foo>", that would be a problem. What you need is an unparsed entity
of sorts for binary data. 

> to outweigh the
> interoperability / backwards incompatibility costs, preferably with
> realistic use cases as actual performance/bandwidth data.  

Mike, where/to-whom would one submit these? Just the business of
optimizing handling of arbitrary-length element and attribute names can
keep someone quite busy for a while, multi-megabyte base64 sections will
not be a good thing.  

Interestingly, all the discussion focus here is on the on-the-wire
encoding issues -- doesn't seem that anyone feels strongly that binary
data should be passed by reference in some external envelope? 


\\ Eugene Kuznetsov
\\ eugene@datapower.com
\\ DataPower Technology, Inc.
\\ http://www.datapower.com - XS40 XML Security Gateway

Received on Tuesday, 11 March 2003 08:21:33 UTC