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Re: Serializing doc + entities

• To: Gregory Murphy <Gregory.Murphy@e...>
• Subject: Re: Serializing doc + entities
• From: "Chiusano Joseph" <chiusano_joseph@b...>
• Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 10:46:07 -0500
• Cc: xml-dev@l...
• Organization: BAH
• References: <Pine.GSO.4.10.10302102123490.15065-100000@gris>

I don't believe you've received a response on this yet:

I would suggest you start with the SOAP with Attachments specification
[1] and continue researching from there (what products implement it,
etc.).  Including the base64-encoded representations within an element
of an XML document is not the best approach for several reasons (some of
these assume that you will use SOAP enveloping):

(1) File size: Base64-encoded data takes one-third more space than the
data before the conversion

(2) Digital signatures: This technique (base64-encoded representations
within element) can present problems if binary files are digitally
signed

(3) Efficiency: Using base64 encoding to send binary data in a SOAP
message requires an encoding or decoding step at the end of the process

I would also recommend you track the DIME [2] and WS-Attachments [3]
specifications which are part of the Global XML Web Services
Architecture (GXA) by Microsoft, IBM, Verisign, and others.  They are
considered "improvements" on SOAP with Attachments, for reasons given in
the specifications.

Hope that helps,
Joe Chiusano
Booz | Allen | Hamilton

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP-attachments
[2] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nielsen-dime-02.txt
[3] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nielsen-dime-soap-01.txt

Gregory Murphy wrote:
> 
> I would like to be able to transport an XML document that contains
> references to unparsed external entities. To this end I would like to
> serialize the document along with its entities.
> 
> It seems to me that the most natural way to accomplish this is to define a
> lexical wrapper for an XML document. The schema would include lexical
> information, such as the declarations for the unparsed entities. An obvious
> candidate for this is Appendix G of XSLT 2.0, "Representation of Lexical
> XML Constructs". The lexical declarations would be followed by elements of
> type base64Binary that contain the unparsed entities themselves, followed
> finally by the document root element. A receiving application could then
> pass the document to a SAX-conformant process, and make the external
> entities available via a special purpose entity manager.
> 
> Does anyone on this list know of any applications that perform this, from
> which I might learn or borrow?
> 
> // Gregory Murphy <Gregory.Murphy@s...>
> // Software Engineer
> // Customer Network Platform, Sun Microsystems
> 
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• References:
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    • From: Gregory Murphy <Gregory.Murphy@e...>

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