Re: [Cbor] Interactions of packed CBOR and tags

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

> On 2020-08-27, at 23:00, Jim Schaad <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> While building a test library of strings for evaluating my algorithm, I
> ended up with a question of how tags interact with the idea of CBOR packing.
> Specifically, if I use a standard date/time string with tag 0, should that
> text string be considered as a candidate for packing?
> 
> 0("1970-01-01T00:00Z") could potentially be compressed to 0(simple(3))
> 
> The problem is that this is no longer a valid CBOR encoding so it would not
> seem to be a legal thing to do.
> 
> Question:  Must packed CBOR be valid CBOR or does that requirement only
> apply to unpacked CBOR?

Great question.

The cop-out could be: either.
Since CBOR-valid packed CBOR is a subset of (just well-formed) packed CBOR, it could be a parameter given to the compressor whether that is allowed to use compression opportunities like the above or not.

What are the benefits/drawbacks:

* (just well-formed) packed CBOR may lead to trouble with a generic decoder that cannot handle (present to the application) invalid constructs like 0(simple(3)).
The application can decide whether it wants to live with this limitation or not.

* the structural coherence of the packed structure (that this draft is about) will be expressed as a validity constraint.  It is a bit weird to then relax validity of what goes in there, but not entirely without precedent (e.g., tag 24, even though there is a more explicit firewall here).

* not using those compression opportunities can be wasteful, not just for the example given above (tag 0), but also for tags like 32.

I think I would emphasize the (just well-formed) packed CBOR, but still introduce CBOR-valid packed CBOR as a selectable additional constraint for applications that need to work with pre-packed (designed before packed was invented) generic decoders.

Do we need to encode this selection?  (E.g., via different top-level tags.)  Probably not.

Grüße, Carsten