Proposed response for Issue 501

I took an action to draft a response to issue 501[1] in our CR issues
list. Here is that response:

Points 1-3: Yes, when using the resource representation header base64 is
always a requirement, even for textual types. The SOAP envelope itself
will always be in a single character encoding. The octet stream
resulting from decoding some base64 text may well be in a different
character encoding. This is not an issue. The character encoding in use
for such data may be determined in a number of ways, including, but not
limited to; specifying the charset as part of the xmime:contentType
attribute (e.g. text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 ), examining the XML
declaration for XML based types (e.g. <?xml version='1.0'
encoding='iso-8859-1' ?>, using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of
the XML 1.0 Recommendation for XML based types, assuming a default
character encoding defined by the specification of the media type.

Point 4: xml:lang is not appropriate for use on the rep:Data element as
base64 is not human-readable text. A SOAP message can carry multiple
instances of the resource representation header and many such headers
may carry representations of the same resource. Thus a given SOAP
message could carry multiple representations of a given resource, each
one in a different human readable language. The resource representation
header allows additional attributes to be specified. Such an attribute
could be defined to indicate the human readable language of a text based
resource.

Regards

Gudge
[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xmlp-cr-issues.html#x501