RE: iSCSI: BASE64 and numerical values

[Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@wasabisystems.com>]

On Tue, 21 May 2002, Robert Snively wrote:

> I guess that my point was that we should be transmitting the
> binary value, not the encoding of the binary value.
>
> Especially if you care about the length, that is the most
> compact version of transmission.
>
> You are never using them in the text-encoded format, so
> why transmit them in a text-encoded format.  The values are
> ALWAYS used only in the binary format.  TCP/IP does not
> have any requirement for them to ever be expressed in the
> text-encoded format.

Good question. The reason is that the WG decided that login negotiation
should be text based. So everything needs to be sent as human-readable
text.

Given that, we need some way to translate binary strings to human-readable
things in a space-efficient manner. Thus the interest in base64.

Take care,

Bill