Foreign object inclusion WAS: Namespaces, Architectural Forms, and Sub-Documents

Gavin McKenzie (gmckenzi@JetForm.com)
Thu, 5 Feb 1998 08:42:07 -0500

David Megginson wrote:
> [snip]
> XML documents may (and perhaps, usually will) contain non-XML objects
> such as wordprocessor documents, spreadsheets, MPEG clips, Java
> applets, audio sequences, and many others -- to date, thankfully, no
> one has proposed uuencoding any these and dumping them inline between
> a start and and tag.
> [snip]

Am I to understand from this paragraph that there would be something
wrong with uuencoded or base64'd resources, like audio clips or even a
Java class, between a start and end tag?

I thought this would be a given. Sure using XLL or simple url hrefs are
great, but many times the requirement is for a single file with all
resources literally included.

This is similar conceptually to the intent of MIME, and MHTML, and OLE
(at one time the E meant something -- embedding). Syntactically MIME
derived methods aren't nearly as nice as stuffing the resource between a
start and end tag.

Take a look at the Internet Open Trading Protocol
http://www.otp.org:8080/ It does this all over the place.

A packaging standard to encapsulate all of the resources in the same
file is nice, but why isn't legitimate to place them all inline?

Gavin.

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Gavin F. McKenzie Vox:+1(613)230-3676 ext 5277
JetForm Corporation Fax:+1(613)594-8886
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