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A comment on The havoc the XML purists wrought. Parent comment

Re:The havoc the XML purists wrought by bsaunder on Wednesday May 19, 2010 @11:29AM (#1361216)
It may matter a lot for some data... When you send a binary file, would you like all of the zeros stripped? Your insignificant data from one perspective is possiblely significant from another perspective.
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Re:The havoc the XML purists wrought by jerf on Wednesday May 19, 2010 @12:35PM (#1361464)
It is not possible to ship binary over XML. Regardless of encoding used, XML rigidly forbids the bytes corresponding to non-whitespace ASCII chars below 32: http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#charsets This makes arbitrary binary impossible. You have to base64 encode it or something.

Not entirely relevant to your point, but worth bringing up. (XML doesn't ever mangle binaries, because it simply forbids them.)

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Re:The havoc the XML purists wrought by scott_s on Wednesday May 19, 2010 @12:08PM (#1361357)
I don't follow. If you need literal, unstructured data embedded in a structured format, then use whatever escape mechanism the format has.
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