Don't we have this already?

[UPDATE: While I was writing this post, Sam Ruby posted likeminded comments and proposes a challenge: In the spirit of the BDG to SOAP 1.1 which exposed all of the machinery of SOAP, I'd like to request that proponents of either the Blogger API or the MetaWeblog API produce a similar BDG for their protocols, and would like to request that it include the first item from the Radio Weblog Post Module example.  I'll start by providing a sample for RESTLogPost.]

Jeremy Allaire is points to an RFC to extend the MetaWeblog API to handle binary media.

I appreciate his passion and advocacy of rich media forms in weblogging. I thought the multimedia weblogging experiment at the Macromedia DevCon was quite interesting and his frank assessment commendable. They certainly have value and are beneficial to evolution and understanding of the medium.

This said, I thought the RFC that he highlights is generally misguided and misses the mark. The challenges that he lists for multimedia handling, while true, are more a product of the Web's inherent design and the limitations of RPC-style APIs -- particularly XML-RPC which is not an extensible protocol.

I admit to having RESTful leanings, but I attempt to practice extreme anti-extremism so hear me out.

In closing his remarks, Jeremy writes the solution [for handling multimedia] we've come up with is very simple --- don't use the weblog to store or deliver any of the binary data, just use it to encapsulate HTML fragments that do live in pages and therefore can apply category meta-data and participate in RSS feeds. But this just doesn't feel right, it's sort of hacking around a system that hasn't yet been designed to handle multimedia conversations.

I generally agree and I understand where he's coming from when he refers to this as sort of hacking because in essence it is by design. The World Wide Web was designed as a system of loosely-coupled hyperlinked resources. Its success is due in part to the simplicity and low barrier to entry that text allows and binary formats cannot achieve. Changing its design would be taking the web out of weblogs.

Where I disagree is the connotation that the system doesn't feel right because is hasn't yet been designed to handle multimedia conversations -- particularly in light of the bigger picture.

This is not to say rich media does not have its place on the Web. It does. Tthe discussions and experimentations taking place intrigue me. They certainly have value and are beneficial to evolution and understanding of the medium.

Utilizing URLs and metadata formats such as RSS may not be ideal in this particular realm, but its the best and most scalable solution thus far and its what we have to work with now.

I said the RFC is misguided because it generally attempts to reinvent the wheel that the Web already created with more effort. People much smarter then I have discussed the merits and limitations. I found the arguments against more persuasive, so I'm no longer a supporter of XML-RPC.

Is the overhead of serializing the request and deserializing the response necessary when a POST /image-lib-service/some/path/or/post/id will suffice? This POST should return a 201 Created HTTP response code with perhaps the URI of that the image can be linked. This is something all Web browsers today can support without additional code or plugins. So I fail to see how XML-RPC is simpler or more effective particularly when it comes to handling binary formats like multimedia.

In the spirit of open and constructive conversation that drives evolution, I stand ready to be convinced otherwise.

[Mea culpa. I just realized I forgot to link to Sam's comments on Dave Winer's essay. Sam comes at it from a different direction and adds some noteworthy perspective.

Dave and I see some of the same data, but we interpret it differently. Here's my take.

Where interfaces are of the simple client/server kind, and where all the state is on the server, the trend I see for the future is that new interfaces will increasingly be defined as a simple HTTP GET.

This of course goes back to Sam's other post I added at the top.]