Re: [core] Comments on draft-ietf-core-yang-cbor-00

[Juergen Schoenwaelder <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 01:22:59PM +0200, Ladislav Lhotka wrote:

> > YANG's native serialization of values are untyped strings.
> 
> To my knowledge, this hasn't been stated as a design feature for YANG,
> it's just a side effect of XML being the only serialization that was
> considered when YANG was being designed.

We use string representations of values in other contexts, e.g., when
writing pattern restrictions or when evaluating xpath expressions. We
also do define canonical string formats for our types.

Note, this does not mean an implementation has store internally all
values as strings but when it matters, the string representation of
values defines the behavior. Except for unions in JSON...

My take has been that non-XML encodings may take advantage of being
able to present data mode 'efficiently' (CBOR) or to make it easier
for applications / libraries (JSON). For me, encodings that change how
we interpret types at the YANG level are somewhat surprising.

/js

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder           Jacobs University Bremen gGmbH
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