Support for binary encodings and MIME types

Hi,

my understanding is that most VOTable libraries still only support TABLEDATA encoding of the table and not FITS or BINARY. Therefore, it's not robust to send, e.g., a VOTABLE/BINARY document to an arbitrary comsumer. Can anybody comment on this?

If we have to be careful about which encodings we sent to which consumers, then it may be necessary to distinguish the encodings in the MIME type. E.g., we might need application/xml+votable-tabledata and application/xml+votable-binary. Comments?

Cheers,
Guy

Guy Rixon 				        gtr-at-ast.cam.ac.uk
Institute of Astronomy   	                Tel: +44-1223-337542
Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA		Fax: +44-1223-337523