> Suppose I wrote up a NOTE, should occupy less than one page,
> proposing a reserved attribute xml:packed with, for the moment,
> only two allowed values, "none" and "base64". The default value is
> "none". If an element has xml:packed="base64" this means that
This sounds reasonably straight-forward, but I'd like a noun rather
than the adjective "packed". Time rightly points out that
"xml:encoding" could cause confusion: are there any better suggestions
out there?
> This obviously couldn't retroactively become part of XML 1.0, but
> if it went through a process and became a W3C recommendation, I bet
> every parser author in the world would support it in about 15
> minutes.
I don't know if the parser authors should worry about it -- how would
one deliver the binary information in the DOM or SAX, for example? It
seems more likely that people would build support into the higher
interface layers like SAXON.
> Base64 (a 4-for-3 encoding) wastes 33%, so I thought about perhaps
> inventing Base128 (8-for-7) or maybe even a higher level to cut
> down wasteage, but Base64 has the advantage that it avoids
> UTF8/ISO-8859 confusion and I bet Mr. LZW will eat that 33%
> anyhow...
Simplicity and ubiquity always win -- stick with Base64, since
everyone can already work with it.
All the best,
David
--
David Megginson david@megginson.com
http://www.megginson.com/