[MOBY-dev] data by reference - a request for comments

[José María Fernández González]

Last weeks we (at INB) were talking about binary objects and data-by-reference 
in our internal list (mainly related to the usage of XInclude), and we found 
that on one hand XInclude allows referencing non-XML content:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xinclude/#text-included-items

but that content must be string-like (with an associated encoding), not binary 
one. So, when we realized that limitation we were talking about extending 
XInclude in a non-standard way, considering a new parse style, called 
'base64'. Standard XInclude understands parse='xml' and parse='text' styles, 
and 'base64' parse mode would work like 'text' one, but encoding the content 
in base64 before including it in the place of the reference.

	What do you think about this hack?

	Best Regards,
		José María

Mark Wilkinson wrote:
> On Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:28:43 -0700, Pieter Neerincx 
> <pieter.neerincx at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> If you want to replace this with a reference the actual data would 
>> still have to be a base64 encoded piece of text. So you can not make a 
>> reference to an image that exists as a plain JPEG, GIF, etc. on a web 
>> server.
> 
> Martin and I discussed this while he was here and the behaviour of this 
> case will be part of his RFC proposal.  It seems to me that it would be 
> silly to b64 encode something that is being passed by reference...  but 
> I agree that to do anything else is a 'hack'.  Nevertheless, there are a 
> lot of 'hacks' in Moby, and this one is one of the more sensible 'hacks' 
> IMO...
> 
> M
> 
> 
> 

-- 
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"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." - Donald Knuth

José María Fernández González
Tlfn: (+34) 91 732 80 00 / 91 224 69 00 (ext 3061)
e-mail: jmfernandez at cnio.es		Fax: (+34) 91 224 69 76
Unidad del Instituto Nacional de Bioinformática
Biología Estructural y Biocomputación	Structural Biology and Biocomputing
Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas
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