We frequently get into the "what is the nature of a standard"
discussion here. I don't think most people really care whether an
XML-RPC implementation is correct; they just want it to work, and that
means it speaks the same XML-RPC as its potential partners, not that
it speaks the XML-RPC described in some document. There is a big
enough base of existing XML-RPC implementations that changing
documents isn't going to affect much.

It would be nice to have a document that describes what "everyone does,"
but this mailing list does almost as well, and

http://effbot.org/zone/xmlrpc-errata.htm

does a good job too. Note that the latter clearly says you can split
base64 lines if you want.

I believe that essentially all XML-RPC implementations use MIME-style
(RFC 2045) base64 encoding -- i.e. with line breaks. And it makes
sense, considering that one of the goals of representing all this
information in XML-RPC is to make it human readable.

John's discovery that even Redstone attempts to implement base64 with
whitespace leaves us with essentially an uncontested rule that base64
can have line breaks.

--
Bryan Henderson San Jose, California