BINARY support (Was: site monitoring)

[Tom McGlynn]

The only place I had seen BINARY data used is from GAVO.  However 
since they have one of the few highly functional TAP services there is 
some incentive to be able to read it.  XSLT transformations are not 
possible (or at least are very much harder) for this format than for 
the TABLEDATA format, so VOView and its relations will have difficulty 
with these data.

	Tom

Douglas Tody wrote:
> Markus -
>
> My impression has been that implementation of binary streams in VOTable
> software is spotty and that the feature is rarely used.  However I don't
> have any hard data on the issue.  Perhaps others can comment if they
> have tried to use this feature or encountered such data.
>
>   	- Doug
>
>
> On Wed, 6 Jul 2011, Markus Demleitner wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Tue, Jul 05, 2011 at 03:39:01PM -0600, Douglas Tody wrote:
>>>> We changed to using the STREAM/BINARY encoding in the VOTables used
>>>> in our TAP interface (suggested by Mark) and so far this seems to
>>>> be satisfying our security types.  [I don't want to get into a
>>>> discussion of what should or should not trigger such flags.]
>>>
>>> Since probably few clients will be able to handle such as response this
>>> is probably not the best solution, although technically legal I guess.
>>> It would be better to address the real problem (smarter security
>>> checking) as someone else suggested.
>>
>> Although I agree that all this has nothing to do with security in any
>> sense of the word: Doug, do you suggest that client support for
>> VOTables with binary streams is rare?
>>
>> Since I'm delivering binary VOTables by default that would be
>> worrying for me (plus, I'm only aware of missing binary support in
>> old versions of VOPlot and now specview).  Before I start checking
>> libraries and clients myself: Does anyone already have an idea what
>> clients or libraries don't support binary VOTables yet?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>>      Markus
>>