Author and all-around good cowpoke
Posts: 13078
posted 18 years ago
Since XML can NOT be arbitary bytes, you MUST encode somehow. Base64 is the most efficient method for doing this. The inflation is only 4 characters per 3 bytes, so it is not a big deal unless you have a slow connection or huge files.
One alternative would be to use XML to pass information pointing to a file that can be transferred by FTP or some other protocol designed for binary data.
Bill