String character range

[Doug Tody]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Mark Taylor wrote:

> So if we want to solve the general problem of transmitting bulk data inline
> rather than by reference we are going to need some more general
> way of doing it - maybe base-64 encoding within a string type.
> 
> The question is whether XML/VOTable is a sufficiently useful special
> case that it's worth making specific accommodation for it in the
> SAMP data types.  My feeling is that it's not, in view of the additional
> conceptual complication it introduces to the standard
> (though as I've already admitted, I wouldn't expect it to cause
> many things to break in practice).  But others might disagree.

It is important to be able to send arbitrary data (including binary
formats) via messaging, however it might be best to leave this to
SAMP 2.0 as there will be other related changes required as well as
we start to consider a broader class of applications.  The essential
thing for binary data will be to cleanly separate the message metadata
and delivery from the message content, so that different types of
message content can be defined.  One can layer applications protocols
on top of the basic messaging facility.

	- Doug