[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] re: Binary Data in XML : Turning back the clock
Samuel R. Blackburn writes: > A couple of weeks ago on this list, there was a thread that was > lamenting the slow adoption of XML in the web community. > > It seems to me that one of the first problems programmers > encounter is XML's inability to handle "binary" data. Once they > hit that wall, they drop XML and move on to something else > (usually a custom format). > > If we could turn back the clock to before 19980210 and get > rid of design goal #3, handling binary data could have been > so easily handled by adding one element attribute. If the > XML spec had included one predefined attribute called > "xml:length" binary data would have been a no-brainer to > handle. Here's an example: > > <BINARY_DATA xml:length="4"><<<<</BINARY_DATA> This suggestion has a few problems. What does 'xml:length' represent -- bytes or characters? How can a program change the encoding (say, from UTF-8 to UCS-4) without actually parsing the document? If I'm transmitting from an M68K to an 80*86 machine, what happens to byte order? When you do need binary data inline, here's a much simpler solution: <BINARY_DATA type="text/plain" enc="base64">PDw8PA==</BINARY_DATA> You can easily add attributes for the length, checksum, digital signature, encryption key, etc. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.com/ xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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