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

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

Thinking about what *I* want in a binary JSON encoding, and taking
into account PHB's points about online encoding and decoding, all I
really want, the one thing I badly want, is counted-bytes and chunked
Unicode and octet strings.  That's it.  So picture JSON, complete with
square and curly brackets, but no commas nor colons, just strings
(byte-counted or chunked), some encoding for numbers, booleans, and
null.  It's the handing of scalars that sucks about JSON: string
escaping, number printing and parsing.

Something like this:

{<Unicode string of length 3>foo<Unicode string of length 3>bar<join
to preceding string, length 3>baz<Unicode string of length
3>num<integer value 5>}

as an encoding of { "foo": "barbaz", "num": 5 }, with "barbaz" chunked.

One of the nice things about such an encoding is that it should be
possible to implement as a fairly small variation on existing code:
it's almost only a different way of encoding scalar types -- the only
other difference being that commas and colons are not needed.

With a variable-length encoding of integers and IEEE 754 64-bit
doubles for reals... that's compact enough.  Not nearly as compact as
we could get with schemas and PER-like encodings, but good enough for
a schema-less encoding.

Nico
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