[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: ASN.1 is an XML Schema Language (How many encodings?)
Reinvention and not doing the homework are facts of life on the web. Weirdly enough, one of the reasons for the web was to make that very easy to do and it usually is. I do remember spending weeks at a time in the university technical library finding out things that I can now find out in seconds, but oh well. What would be interesting is to hear reasons for having multiple encodings. While generalized binaries for XML have been hotly debated (and they do exist as Robin Berjon can attest to), it has been said that a generalized binary doesn't do enough to make it worth having for apps that really need one. X3D will have a binary without a doubt and companies are bidding that work. I shall be interested to see if a specialized binary or a generalized binary is selected. Free bolt-in decoders will be a factor. But given your years of experience, why are multiple encodings ever necessary excepting the binary which I put in a class of its own? len From: Bob Wyman [mailto:bob@w...] Claude L Bullard wrote: >Fewer encodings is better. Without question this is true -- as long as you accept: We should have no fewer encodings than necessary... The question is: How many are necessary and what should they/it be? Of course, answering those two questions could take a very long time... > Yet more encodings have costs so communities of interest > should beware arguments that come down to lossless transcoding. You are absolutely right. Perhaps we should state a rule: "We should have no *more* encodings than necessary..." (the inverse of above...) There are few things more frustrating than having to devote valuable engineering time to supporting some "cool new" format that offers absolutely no real benefit over what we were using already but just happens to be popular with the customer/user/devloper community this week. This is one of the reasons that I really like the idea behind ASN.1 and abstract syntaxes in general. As long as my structures are defined in an abstract manner, what I need to support some random new format is simply a new encoder/decoder which should use the same APIs as the stuff I had before. Given a nicely modular system like this I'm shielded from much of the expense of dealing with the "fad of the week/year" when it comes to encoding. However, this doesn't mean that I think we should switch encodings casually. In fact, I couldn't feel more strongly that we should minimize the number of encodings that we use. i.e. We should have no more and no fewer than necessary. Less means we can't accomplish important goals, more means that we're wasting our time. After almost 30 years in the business I'm really tired of seeing coder's time and lives wasted by supporting stuff that offers no real advantage over what we already had. This is one reason why I support PER instead of one of the "binary flavors of the month." We've already got PER and we've got tools that handle it. Unless something is massively better, there is no reason to retool or invent something new. [Flame Alert...] I am really [expletive deleted] by the evidence that some of the people who are proposing new binary formats have not had the decency or responsibility to research what already existed before taking all our time with their proposals... If you are going to propose something new, then you have a responsibility to study the past carefully and explain in detail why your solution is better than what came before. Some of the "binary XML" proposals look like simple reinventions of BER and could only have been put forward by someone who wasn't aware of BER -- thus, someone who simply didn't spend enough time researching the problem domain before hassling us all with their silly proposals. Reviewing them has been an absolute waste of everyone's time. We have BER. We don't need a "new BER."
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