James, thanks for pointing at DIME - you are right on with what it is
intended for.
We just submitted DIME as an Internet Draft and it is now available at
[1]. We also have a mailing list for discussion of DIME - you can find
instructions at [2]. There are a few changes from the spec on gotdotnet
[3] but they are quite minor.
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen
mailto:
[1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-nielsen-dime-00.txt
[2] http://discuss.develop.com/dime.html
[3] http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/xml_wsspecs/dime/default.htm
>-----Original Message-----
>From: James Clark [mailto:]
>Sent: Friday, November 16, 2001 21:36
>To: Gavin Thomas Nicol;
>Subject: Re: [xml-dev] Packaging (was Re: [xml-dev] Interoperability)
>
>
>
>--On 16 November 2001 23:42 -0500 Gavin Thomas Nicol
><> wrote:
>
>> On Friday 16 November 2001 07:44 pm, James Clark wrote:
>>> Another format that should be considered is DIME:
>>>
>>> http://www.gotdotnet.com/team/xml_wsspecs/dime/default.htm
>>>
>>> It seems pleasantly simple and well-designed. You can stream it for
>>> both input and output. It is being used by the Web
>Services Routing
>>> Protocol
>>
>> OTOH. I have developed a severe aversion to any MIME-base format for
>> general packaging of XML... lot's of issues that I don't
>even want to
>> think about anymore.
>
>In what sense does DIME have a "MIME-base"? The only
>connection between
>DIME and MIME that I can see is that DIME allows you to
>specify the type of
>a particular member with a MIME media-type; I can't see
>anything wrong with
>that, especially since it gives you a choice of whether you
>label the type
>of a member with a MIME media-type or with an absolute URI.
>
>> Compared to XAR (or DZIP) I would say that DIME is more complex...
>
>I'm surprised you think that. ZIP provides a lot more
>functionality than
>DIME:
>
>- file names
>- file attributes
>- compression
>- checksums
>- random access
>
>All DIME does is allow to you pack a sequence of objects into
>a single byte
>stream, where each object consists of:
>
>- a type (either a MIME media-type or an absolute URI)
>- a unique identifier (a URI)
>- a sequence of bytes
>
>It does this in a way that is simple and efficient for both
>reading and
>writing.
