Transporting Binary Data in SOAP (O'Reilly) [LWN.net]

Rich Salz shows how to use SOAP for transporting binary data on O'Reilly. "XML doesn't handle embedded binary data very well. Naive developers first try to embed the data directly into their document, reasoning that since Unicode uses all possible byte values, they'll be able to do this. They realize their mistake as soon as their embedded content has a byte with a special value like 0x3C (less than) or perhaps 0x26 (ampersand). The clever naïf might try to fix this by wrapping their content in a CDATA construct, but that only makes the problem less likely, rather than removing it. Suppose the content is a SAX library -- it's quite possible that the CDATA terminator string, "]]>", will show up."

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