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On Wednesday 19 December 2001 05:24 am, Alan Kent wrote:
> If I have understood your desire, I guess we differ here. I would
> rather see XML (that claims to support Unicode) support all of Unicode.
> I *personally* don't feel that prohibiting valid Unicode characters
> from appearing in documents is worth the benefit of protecting people
> against feeding in data in the wrong encoding.
Control characters are suspect at best though.
What I don't think people understand is that representing binary data as
*characters* for the sake of convenience will only open up the system to
abuse on one hand, and make *both* text *and* binary transfer unreliable.
In the example Mr. Rhys gave of serializing arbitrary binary data into an XML
document, the only way that the system can reliably *decode* the data, is to
work by converting characters into bytes, and then calling the
deserialization tools on that. Possible, yes, but guess what? YOU WOULD DO
EXACTLY THE SAME THING TODAY if you used BASE64 encoding.
If you don't do this, your binary data *cannot* be reliably transferred,
especially in the face of transcoding.
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