[Cbor] Re: 🔔 WGLC on draft-ietf-cbor-cde-08

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2025-03-18, at 18:03, Anders Rundgren <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> In RFC 8949 4.2.2 Rule 2 is a "friendly advice".  I.e. non-normative.

That numbered list is preceded by:

      Example rules for this are:

Please read.

The thing we didn’t have when we wrote this is a strong terminology distinguishing deterministic encoding from deterministic representation.  That led to the phrase "protocol's deterministic encoding” in the sentence leading up to this (what these are examples for), which in today’s terminology would be “application protocol’s ALDR rules”.

What you didn’t quote was the text in 4.2.1:

      Floating-point values also MUST use the shortest form that
      preserves the value, e.g., 1.5 is encoded as 0xf93e00 (binary16)
      and 1000000.5 as 0xfa49742408 (binary32)

> In draft-ietf-cbor-cde-08 the same text is "stronger" but still non-normative.  No SHOULD or MUST in sight.

Not needed, see above.

> That is, CDE effectively MUST be accompanied by a derived document in order to provide a normative deterministically encoding standard.

No.

> Since dCBOR is the only derived CDE document, dCBOR effectively becomes the norm.

No, not at all.

> Not that I actually care about CDE, but this situation appears pretty absurd seen from my watchtower.

It sure is absurd to come to this misinterpretation.

Grüße, Carsten