RE: ;binary

["Steven Legg" <steven.legg@adacel.com.au>]

Chris,

Christopher Oliva wrote:
> > The problem with this is that if a server is allowed to 
> > return ;binary when the client makes a request without 
> > ;binary then the servers might actually do that.  That 
> > would be bad as client wouldn't get what they asked for. 
> > 
> As I have shown above, the client would know what they are getting
> since the server has replied with ";binary".

Unfortunately, client implementors often don't take into account all
the potential responses they can get. They usually do enough to make
their client work with their preferred LDAP server and leave it at
that. So even if we explicitly specify that servers are allowed to return
";binary" without it being requested, there will still be people
implementing clients that don't expect it.


Apropos of the current discussion, I've found a good reason for NOT
specifying that the native LDAP encoding for some syntax is the
same as its ";binary" encoding. I've just submitted an I-D for
an LDAP profile of X.500's Basic Access Control (it should appear in
a few days) which uses the ACI Item syntax from RFC 2252. I've defined
a human-readable native LDAP encoding for this syntax. However, I
would have had a problem if the native LDAP encoding for this syntax
had been previously defined to be the same as its ";binary" encoding.

By not defining the native LDAP encoding to be the same as the ";binary"
encoding for syntaxes that don't have a defined human-readable encoding,
we leave open the possibility that we might define one in the future.


Regards,
Steven