Dave Cridland wrote: > On Mon Nov 5 15:11:33 2007, Thomas Charron wrote: >> On 11/5/07, Michal 'vorner' Vaner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> > Hello >> > On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 02:45:05PM +0000, Dave Cridland wrote: >> > > Another option would be to setup a distinct connection (and >> protocol) for >> > > routing blobs, and so send them through the server, yet not >> in-band. I'm >> > > not comfortable with this, because it means essentially >> duplicating all >> > > security information, and maintaining synchronization between two >> distinct >> > > streams. >> > Or make the connection blobs by default, and some blobs could contain >> > complete XML documents, like this: >> > lenght of first block >> > <message to='bla'....> >> > length of second block >> > <iq ...> >> > length of third block >> > some binary data. >> > It is as much drastic approach as the blobs, it changes the protocol >> > from the very basic ground. Furthermore, you can extract the stanza and >> > feed it to any XML parser. >> >> Not to mention the documentation would be much easier. We could >> just refer to the BEEP standards instead of having to write our own. >> Of course, one could argue, just use BEEP at that point. > > Way ahead of you. See the first paragraph of the mail quoted above. :-) > > The essential principle is much the same, but I'm not advocating > bringing the whole of BEEP into play, here. That has flow-control and > all sorts, and supports the splitting of a message into multiple frames, > which brings in a lot of complexity. > > This complexity is unwarranted, in my opinion, in the context of XMPP. > The one thing we might want - and I stress might - is the framing of > arbitrary data by framing everything. > > We've always relied, in XMPP, on the implicit framing that XML can give > us, but that's not always the best option, as we've seen. Base64 doesn't > - in my opinion - grant us sufficient efficiency in a number of > circumstances. > > So we need something else, and our two options boil down to either > framing everything - the BEEP method - or an escape mechanism which is > used to frame non-XML data - we can call this the IMAP method, since > it's pretty similar. > > I strongly suspect, given the way the discussion is going, that we > either have to consider framing everything - and that's a huge break > from XMPP - or else we need an escape mechanism that works. Or, of > course, we decide to give up and frame using XML as now, and use base64 > to cope.
As always, what are the use cases? If XML is black-and-white, I see: 1. Include a little dab of color -- an emoticon, a PNG avatar, a thumbnail for a file, a small inline image for whiteboarding, or whatever (something less than 50k and perhaps less than 10k). Here Base64 might be all we need, via data: or cid: URLs perhaps. 2. Attach a larger color sketch -- a file, the image for which a thumbnail is a representation, or whatever (50k to 1M?). I think we use HTTP-PUT (perhaps via WebDAV) and jabber:x:oob, with IBB as a fallback. 3. Send a huge color canvas -- a music file, a podcast, a video, or whatever (1M+?). I don't know what we use for this. Peter -- Peter Saint-Andre https://stpeter.im/
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