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

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

On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 1:53 PM, Nico Williams <[e-mail]>wrote:

> > BSON does not do that quite like I would like but I can fake the same
> effect
> > by using an array of Binary rather than one Binary chunk and the same for
> > strings.
>
> I think that's as well as you can expect to do without having to
> resort to escaping binary/string characters.
>

The alternative would be to declare new data types for chunked strings and
chunked binary which would be closed by an end marker.

The advantage to that approach is that it can be used by a transcoder that
has a fixed buffer size converting from JSON to the binary encoding.


It would be fairly easy to add to BSON as they have plenty of unused code
points. The existing scheme is not very satisfactory as they represent
lengths as fixed 32 bit integers!! Kind of disappointing when a single
video file can easily be over 4Gb. Or at least would be if most equipment
didn't have to dance around brain dead file systems with the same
limitation.


Sure counts of items are better than ASN.1's counts of bytes. But I can't
see any utility in the counts of objects either. If you are trying to
navigate to a particular point in the structure you are going to have to
parse the whole stream regardless. The only way you could skip over a whole
object to go onto the next would be with something like the ASN.1 definite
length scheme.

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Website: http://hallambaker.com/