Re: [Cbor] Review of draft-ietf-cbor-packed-02

[Russ Housley <[e-mail]>]

> On Mar 15, 2021, at 4:33 PM, Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> On 2021-03-15, at 19:40, Russ Housley <[e-mail]> wrote:
>> 
>> I felt this point of divergence from the original design goal needed explicit discussion.
>> 
>> I'm not sure what the right answer might be.  Maybe some preamble to say that a named table is needed for successfully recovering the entire content. In the current document, this context is assumed.
> 
> I added to PR#2:
> 
>> * By the application environment, e.g., a media type.  These can
>>   define tables that amount to a static dictionary that can be used in
>>   a CBOR data item for this application environment.
>> +  Note that, without this information, a data item that uses such a
>> +  static dictionary can be decoded at the CBOR level, but not fully
>> +  unpacked.
>> +  The table setup mechanisms provided by this document are defined in
>> +  such a way that an unpacker can at least recognize if this is the
>> +  case.
>> 
>> * By one or more tags enclosing the packed content.
> […]
> 
> I’m not sure that this fully addresses your comment, but I agree that it is important to make this point.


Not completely.  It mkes it clear that the unpack will know that it has an unknown table index.  That is good.  Should there be an explicit identifier of the predefined starting point for the tables?

Russ