> (Question: should that outrage be towards the 
> people who designed XML as a text language?  Probably not: it 
> should be towards those who generated and propagated the 
> doctrine that XML is suitable as a generic structured data 
> language.  And towards ourselves for not spotting the lie.)

We've always known this was a lie, that XML was not really designed as a
generic structured data language and doesn't do as much (arguably less)
than ASN.1/BER etc. etc., but then we've always known that betamax was
better than vhs...

Sometimes being right isn't enough...
 
> I don't think we should be quick to dismiss real cases just 
> because they don't seem like the kind of thing _we_ would 
> want to do. 

No - but in this particular case, I suspect if you went back to the
database owners and asked what this character is doing there, they'd
reply that it was a mistake and remove it from their end... So not worth
making a fuss about.

However, as per my follow up e-mail there may be cases (e.g. an index of
audio terms) when you might want binary data returned as terms. At
present I could use the extraTermData to do so. I'd favour mirroring the
approach we use for records (introducing elements for schema and packing
to the term element) for two reasons:

i) the general stylistic guide to use element rather than attribute
forms in SOAP
ii) it seems sensible to use similar mechanisms in similar situations.

Also just indicating that the term is base64 encoded is not quite
sufficient for the same reason that I called the modifier mimeEncoded
rather than base64Encoded in the Music Context set - which is ...

> I have only two 
> comments: first, that the relation modifier's name 
> "mimeEncoded" is ambiguous as it could refer either to Base64 
> or Quoted-Printable,

The music context set is in draft form, and I've not written all my
thoughts down yet (too many other things...)

The problem with having a base64Encoded modifier is that although I know
how to decode the data, I've no idea what the thing is I get once
decoded (is this a string with stange character in, an audio wave file,
a video, a jpg, a mpeg, an executable). My intent with mimeEncoded is
that it would include the various MIME headers as well as the data
itself e.g. something like:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 #xA Content-transfer-encoding:
base64 #xA Uo8ey785ffshvo78f4873vv87cbt0q63

(and luckily #xA is valid in XML 1.0)

Matthew