On Wed, 2007-18-04 at 23:25 -0700, Douglas Otis wrote: > On Apr 18, 2007, at 8:31 PM, Marius Scurtescu wrote: > > > Base64 encoding is a pretty good candidate for binary data, but you > > cannot apply the same encoding to text fields. > > RFC4648 "URL and Filename safe" Base 64 Alphabet might be a good choice. > > > Applying base64, or similar encoding appropriate for binary data, to > > text fields has two drawbacks: > > - renders the field unreadable > > Binary data is often unreadable.
True, but text is readable and ideally it should stay like that. > > > - increases the size of the field > > Base 64 increases the size of the encoded element by about 30%. > > > URL-encoding has the advantage that probably all web frameworks will > > have functions to encode and decode this format. > > URL-encoding increases the size of the encoded element by 300%. Only unsafe characters are encoded, not the whole string. Not sure how UTF-8 changes any of this. Marius _______________________________________________ specs mailing list specs@openid.net http://openid.net/mailman/listinfo/specs
