Why the special character restriction?

[Anne Wilson]

Hi,

As some of you might know, we're testing the use of INN to relay data in 
near real time.  It's working great - INN is a great package that works 
well and has lots of really nice features.  (If you'd like to see the 
stats see 
http://my.unidata.ucar.edu/content/projects/nldm/relayStats/plotStats.php.)

But, I still get asked a question for which I have no good answer.  Why 
the continued restriction on special characters in the message body? 
Why can't the message body just be a black box?

It's not a big deal for us to do a simple encoding because we visit 
every byte of a data product anyway in order to compute a signature. 
But, if we didn't want to compute a signature the cost of encoding would 
be much harder to swallow.

Anne
-- 
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Anne Wilson			UCAR Unidata Program		
anne at unidata.ucar.edu		       P.O. Box 3000
               			  Boulder, CO  80307
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