I'm thinking about implementing an RPC mechanism over HTTP. The POST method seems to be suitable for the calls. However, since each call comes with the binary payload, there's a decision to be made about how to attach that binary data to the POST request. It seems there are two content types for POSTs of use today: application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data. The former seems to require percent-escaping binary data, while the latter seems to add some overhead with the boundaries/content-disposition fields.
Therefore my question is: how good is it to just use application/octet-stream as a POST content type and just include the binary payload afterwards as is? Will it go through all proxies? Will all HTTP servers be able to handle this? Is it standards-compliant? In other words, should I go for it?
Best Answer
Yes, you can do that; but it would be better to use a more specific type that makes the message self-descriptive.