Re: [Cbor] [art] Artart early review of draft-ietf-cbor-file-magic-02

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There's an odd characteristic about this document, not in its content,
but in its style.  It's written as a proposal (a word which is used
several times), and yet it's intended to be a BCP, which tells people
what do to.  And various passages are written as if the reader is a
co-designer.  For instance,

   A magic number is ideally a unique fingerprint, present in the first
   4 or 8 bytes of the file, which does not change when the contents
   change, and does not depend upon the length of the file.

(Though it would be more accurate to say, "... present at a defined
location in the first few bytes of the file ...".)  If this was a
specification, it would say essentially the same fact as "This scheme
has the desired property of magic numbers of having a unique fingerprint
at a fixed location near the beginning of the data."

I get the sense that the authors are ambivalent whether they are saying
what implementers should do, or just floating an idea.  Though I don't
know if that is accurate.

As far as content goes, I favor the "tag wrapped" version over the "tag
sequence", as it has assured upward-compatibility (if the implementation
follows the requirement to ignore unknown tags).  In particular, if the
data consists of a sequence of CBOR items, each one could be tagged (if
they might differ) or only the first one be tagged (if they don't).  But
that's a different matter.

Dale