Re: Representation header

On Nov 5, 2003, at 12:17 AM, Anish Karmarkar wrote:

>> * content encoding - should we have a separate piece of metadata that 
>> talks about the encoding? In MIME, that's Content-Transfer-Encoding; 
>> in HTTP it's content-coding. If we don't do this, it bakes base64 in 
>> as the only option ever (because it's implicit), so it may be 
>> beneficial to specify something like
>
> I am not sure I understand, aren't the contents of the EII always 
> base64Binary?

I was actually toying with the idea of having a relationship between 
the headers in the XML and the headers in MIME, but I've become 
convinced that this isn't necessary (and actually would be a bad 
thing).

I think we should consider, however, that some Representations that 
people want to convey with messages may not be base64 encoded. The main 
use case I can think of would be text-based formats like CSS; it seems 
extremely un-human-friendly to require these to be base64 encoded when 
doing so doesn't provide any benefit.


--
Mark Nottingham   Principal Technologist
Office of the CTO   BEA Systems