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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@reutershealth.com>
"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
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