Re: Searching for concensus on Pub Control (Re: Consensus call: PacePubControl)

[Ezra Cooper <ezra@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jul 21, 2005, at 1:58 PM, James M Snell wrote:

> If I want to have a photoblog, I would not use APP to post the images 
> themselves, I would use APP to post the entries describing the images. 
>  If I want to post the entry to the collection and upload the photo at 
> the same time, I either include the binary content of the photo as 
> base64 encoded content within the entry, or use a multipart message 
> with a <content src="..." /> in the entry.

Actually, for transferring the bits of an image, I prefer using PUT to 
a so-called Generic Resource. The idea of having an XML wrapper around 
that kind of raw data was shot down on the list a long time ago. At 
least one reason is that base64 gives you a 33% increase in transfer 
size, which is a burden, particuarly for mobile clients.

My previous point was that we should treat the Generic Collections as 
the raw cargo-hold, stripped of all the comforts of first-class Atom 
Entries. Generic resources are simpler if they don't have metadata 
(which would necessitate an XML wrapper), and you can "annotate" a 
resource by creating an entry that links to it.

Atom is designed with application-specific semantics around the idea of 
an *entry*. Every other kind of data is second-class.

Ezra