Re: [core] Report on first Resource Directory plugtest

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

Hi Jim,

>> In updating a document, we can go as far as we want.
>> But of course we want to be reasonable and make sure we don’t invalidate
>> existing implementations of link-format.
>> Instead of doing a link-format v2, the idea is live with v1 and move over to
>> JSON/CBOR.
> 
> Doing this is going to make my life as an implementor really a mess.  I will no longer be able to simply have a single representation of the internal data structure and do the parsing as serialization to a common format.  I am now going to need to remember what the original representation was and do the serializations differently based on that value.   In addition to this, all of my internal calls to setup the link format to begin with need to have this distinction so that things get serialized correctly.  

That would indeed be a disaster, and I thought we can avoid all of this.  
My assumption was that we can move forward the data model while staying compatible with the older serialization.

> What would this mean for serializing out /.well-known/core - are the meanings different if one serializes to cbor as opposed to link-format?  

If we don’t want to carry forward the idiosyncrasies of link-format to JSON/CBOR, that is the inevitable result.  
But this should be doable with a small piece of code in the serializer, not by having two different data models.

Grüße, Carsten