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Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation

• To: tbray@t... (Tim Bray)
• Subject: Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
• From: John Cowan <jcowan@r...>
• Date: Wed, 16 Oct 2002 17:37:01 -0400 (EDT)
• Cc: richard@c... (Richard Tobin), xml-dev@l...
• In-reply-to: <3DADD8A0.2000700@t...> from "Tim Bray" at Oct 16, 2002 02:22:40 PM

Tim Bray scripsit:

> In the general case where you want to wrap up weird bits of binary 
> gibberish to control hardware, why don't you just base64 it and not have 
> to worry about which of them are magic C0 Controls and which aren't...

Well, that's a question.  Are the terminal control sequences characters or
octets?  On the face of X3.64 (I forget the ISO number), they are octets,
but people think of "move up" as ESC [ A, not 1/11 5/11 4/1 (in the
poor-mans-hex used by the standard).

> And you know perfectly 
> well that the people who want these aren't trying to exchange termcaps, 
> they're trying to wrap binary gibberish in the trappings of XML 
> interoperability.  

I don't think it's actually about raw binary -- little-endian integers
or IEEE floats or the like.  It's about not having a guarantee that the
CHAR fields in databases can be reliably exported to XML.  Excluding #x0
kills real binary data, but doesn't affect database data much because
of C APIs.

-- 
John Cowan    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan   <jcowan@r...>
    "Any legal document draws most of its meaning from context. A telegram
    that says 'SELL HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES IBM SHORT' (only 190 bits in
    5-bit Baudot code plus appropriate headers) is as good a legal document
    as any, even sans digital signature." --me

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
    • From: "G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@C...>

• References:
  • Re: Quick Review of XML 1.1 Candidate Recommendation
    • From: Tim Bray <tbray@t...>

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