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> This was basically the gist of my suggestion last week; however, I was
> convinced of its unsuitability in fairly short order. The encoding
> problem seems to be the kind of issue that might be able to be worked
> around, but the result would likely be a messy, unsatisfactory "bodge"
> (that is the British term, yes?).
I would simply use Base64 encoding for smaller items, as you seem to suggest anyway.
> Plus, it seems to me that the only problem with binary encoding is if
> you want to embed large chunks. For short items, like encoded
> signatures for security purposes, the overhead doesn't matter that much.
> And for longer items, it seems to me that embedding, for example, video
> (!) in XML begs the real question, which is how to manage heterogeneous,
> distributed content, not how to force it all to fit into an XML doc.
Yes, good point.
For video - it could also be like the reverse:
embedding XML in video data streams. Which means, the transmission
protocol extracts XML fragments or documents rather than the XML parser
extracting video frames. Sort of like mixed content, just not character based.
What brings us back to your question about heterogeneous content is:
Should all those XML pieces together form another document?
It might be desirable from some other point of view (you can always
look at the problem from different angles, obviously).
Karl
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