Re: [Cbor] Interactions of packed CBOR and tags

Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> Thu, 03 September 2020 19:56 UTC

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From: Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org>
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Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2020 21:55:54 +0200
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To: Brendan Moran <Brendan.Moran@arm.com>
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Subject: Re: [Cbor] Interactions of packed CBOR and tags
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On 2020-09-03, at 18:57, Brendan Moran <Brendan.Moran@arm.com> wrote:
> 
> However it’s still going to be bigger than a cbor-encoded plain text URIs if you have more than a few > 23 byte path segments, which is a bit annoying.

It’s all in your head :-)

The point of CBOR (which also was the point of JSON) was to be a reasonably appropriate encoding for much of what an application wants to do (the difference between JSON and CBOR is in what is “reasonably appropriate” in the areas of application).

There is *always* a way to create a more compact bespoke encoding.  For anything.
For URIs: We haven’t even started Huffman-coding the string parts.  (Or LZ-coding with some smart predefined dictionary.  Whatever.)  So why worry about the length indicator for > 23 byte path segments, where the text itself could be so much more efficiently coded?

Engineers have a tendency to react to perceived optimization opportunities.  That is of course a good thing.  It turns bad when we start to tweak something and incur complexity costs just because it is slightly worse than something else.
(If it is much worse in some metric, and that particular metric matters, well then back to the drawing board.  But not here.)

Learning to use CBOR includes learning to tolerate the occasional bouts of cognitive dissonance that come from knowing “I could do this better” where the “better” is a few percent.

Grüße, Carsten