[COAS-List] Re: Fw: XML and New England Neurosurgery Network

[Gunther Schadow <gunther@aurora.rg.iupui.edu>]

David, (and sorry for all the other personal recipients, don't want to
bother you)

> OK, I see what is going on now.
>
> The problem is that you cannot say:
>
>    <IMG SRC="xray-image.dicom" ALIGN="MIDDLE" BORDER="0">
>
> since the http tools do not speak dicom. (The server can
> potentially handle this, the client will not process it
> accurately).
>
> The solution I see is to persuade one of the DICOM vendors
> to implement a DLL for server / client use as a plug-in.
>
> This is the traditional approach.
>
> Trying to make XML itself embed dicom binaries hidden within
> the body of the text is not where sane men want to go!

I don't think that your radical denial of the usefulness of
encapsulated binary material in XML is the last word. First of all, I
think that the NOTATION declaration exists exactly for the inclusion
of other material into XML, so why not binaries in base64 encoding?

One other use-case for this is security. You want to hide a certain
region of your document to be password protected or only accessible by
the list owner of a secret key? In order to do that, you want to be
able to encrypt the XML section and drop it back into the rest of the
document as a piece of binary material. It is just the natural way to
do this. (BTW: does anyone know of a W3C proposal to stanbdardize XML
security? If we go along with HL7 to use XML by default, I will
quickly write up such a proposal).

The encapsulation of binary material using the NOTATION declaration is
very similar to the MIME way of thinking. I believe that it has it's
place in XML. Especially I don't see why you should have to use XML
*and* MIME just in order to send a compleate peace of
multi-application multi-notation XML document.

regards
-Gunther

Gunther Schadow ----------------------------------- http://aurora.rg.iupui.edu
Regenstrief Institute for Health Care
1001 W 10th Street RG5, Indianapolis IN 46202, Phone: (317) 630 7960
schadow@aurora.rg.iupui.edu ---------------------- #include <usual/disclaimer>