Re: [Cbor] Chunks with tags inside indefinite-length string (major type 2 and 3)

[[e-mail] (Dale R. Worley)]

Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]> writes:
> Why would we allow tags here?  Indefinite strings are a very limited
> syntactical structure; there is no need to allow flexibility here (in
> particular if there is no semantic gain from that).

The reason I argue is that having worked with SIP, I've become very
respectful of extensibility.  SIP has taken over the internals of every
major telecom company, it seems.  And that doesn't seem to be because
SIP is wonderfully designed; it's sort of a running joke to list the
things one would change in the next version of SIP if it didn't have to
be upward-compatible.  But SIP has a number of very general
extensibility mechanisms that make it possible to implement almost any
telecomm feature in an upward-compatible way.  And there are dozens if
not hundreds of SIP extensions.

And while I cannot guess what use might be made of tagging chunks of
indefinite-length strings, it seems to me that as long as the
fundamental structure of CBOR allows such a thing to be constructed
unambiguously, the wisest course of action is to make it clear that such
constructs can sensibly be made, but the current standard assigns no
meaning to them.

Dale