Tim Bray scripsit:

>  In the general case where you want to wrap up weird bits of binary 
>  gibberish to control hardware, why don't you just base64 it and not have 
>  to worry about which of them are magic C0 Controls and which aren't...

Well, that's a question.  Are the terminal control sequences characters or
octets?  On the face of X3.64 (I forget the ISO number), they are octets,
but people think of "move up" as ESC [ A, not 1/11 5/11 4/1 (in the
poor-mans-hex used by the standard).

>  And you know perfectly 
>  well that the people who want these aren't trying to exchange termcaps, 
>  they're trying to wrap binary gibberish in the trappings of XML 
>  interoperability.  

I don't think it's actually about raw binary -- little-endian integers
or IEEE floats or the like.  It's about not having a guarantee that the
CHAR fields in databases can be reliably exported to XML.  Excluding #x0
kills real binary data, but doesn't affect database data much because
of C APIs.

-- 
John Cowan    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan   <jcowan@[...].com> 
    "Any legal document draws most of its meaning from context. A telegram
    that says 'SELL HUNDRED THOUSAND SHARES IBM SHORT' (only 190 bits in
    5-bit Baudot code plus appropriate headers) is as good a legal document
    as any, even sans digital signature." --me

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