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> base64 encoding and application level decoding is also an accepted practice

I feel seen. I remember suggesting this during a design discussion where the issue was how to embed an arbitrary document in another, where the embedded document could even be ill-formed. Everybody told me it was a gross and dirty hack and ignored the suggestion.

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It is quite a common pragmatic architectural pattern in the HTML architecture. For example, data urls where a MIME type representation is encoded in the URL format is used for embedding images and other MIME types.

So, if one is building an application and needs to render a proprietary data object, this is a good way (not the only one) to handle it using a client library.

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