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

[Phillip Hallam-Baker <[e-mail]>]

On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Nico Williams <[e-mail]>wrote:

> Also, I believe this is the fifth binary encoding of JSON proposed
> thus far.  Can we list the ones that have been proposed thus far?
>
> Here's a [no-doubt partial] list:
>
>  - BSON
>  - MsgPack
>  - Smile
>  - UBJSON
>  - CBOR
>
> That's just the ones I recall seeing before or which I found in 30
> seconds of searching.
>
> Some of these are used in actual protocols right now.
>

+1

I don't see any particular reason to favor this new proposal.



> I do agree that we need a schema-less encoding (which means we can't
> get as good as PER and friends).  We probably don't need a
> schema-capable encoding for JSON (though that might be nice).  We do
> need schema-aware encodings for some protocols, but we have plenty
> already, and none are nor need to be JSONish.
>

What I think you intend here is that the encoding should not be
schema-aware. Whether or not you have a formal schema is not the issue
here, the issue is whether it is necessary to know the schema to make sense
of the wire format.

One of the main reasons that JSON and XML encodings are attractive is that
you can look at the wire format and make sense of them. ASN.1 BER encoding
can also be read with an appropriate dump tool. It has to be possible to do
the same with Binary JSON.


Some of the compact XML representations used knowledge of the schema to
improve packing density and some could be read using a dump tool but
required knowledge of the mapping from the text representation to the
binary to be able to convert from one to the other.

I think it is clear that any JSON binary coding has to be readable without
knowledge of a schema and that a non-schema aware tool must be able to
convert between the two formats.


Insisting on a single representation for a number seems much less important
to me. Whether 7 is represented in one, two, four or eight bytes seems to
me to be something that can be left to the implementations.

-- 
Website: http://hallambaker.com/