Re: [apps-discuss] Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)

[Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]>]

On May 23, 2013, at 1:13 PM, Nico Williams <[e-mail]> wrote:

> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 2:24 PM, Paul Hoffman <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> On May 23, 2013, at 11:35 AM, James M Snell <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>>> That's well and good, from everything I've seen so far in this thread,
>>> the collective majority opinion can be summarized as "Ugh... Groan..
>>> Another one? Really?"
>> 
>> Just a note that this is one of the only ones that people are groaning about that has an Internet Draft and might go through the IETF consensus process. Carsten and I (maybe naively) thought that doing this in this environment, instead of say posting ephemeral specs on a web page and not having it be clear where the community fit it, was a good thing.
> 
> There's a huge world outside the IETF.  The folks working on Simple
> and BSON, to take two examples, may not care about bringing their work
> to us, but then, they may also be annoyed by our blindsiding them with
> a standards-track binary JSON (I know, CBOR's a superset) encoding
> that's not interoperable with theirs.

Sure. The many communities don't seem to be talking to each other.

> In particular, if there's wide deployment of one of them, why
> shouldn't we pick one of them?

If the design goals of any of them don't align with the others, why should we pick just one? As a specific example, some of the many formats are optimized for message size at the expense of extensibility, while others are optimized for extensibility at the expense of message size. Why should only one of those be forced on everyone else?

> Should we not invite the wider JSON community to this discussion?

We should indeed. That's why Carsten and I did this as an Internet Draft and brought it here instead of grabbing some domain name and getting just our friends involved.

--Paul Hoffman