[E-impact] The "human-readable" delusion

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 17-May-23 02:50, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> I hope we would have a hard time finding someone in the community to disagree
> with these as principles. Alas, once we get to actual ideas what we could
> still do beyond all that we have already done, work gets a lot harder.
> 
> For example, is it really worthwhile for energy saving to ask the whole
> JSON application layer world/standards we have to evolve to CBOR (binary) ?
> 
> I think the energy saving in high-speed networks would be negligible and
> likely outweight by the energy spent by the additional IETF efforts
> meeting time, travel, brains involved,... do add CBOR definitions for
> all the existing JSON work. And figure out interop.

Just an observation, or possibly Carpenter's Corollary to Moore's Law:

All "human-readable" formats progressively degrade to "machine-readable"
as memory and CPU become cheaper.

Prime examples are HTML and XML, of course. 30 years ago HTML documents
were written by humans and were more or less understandable to humans.
The IETF site in November 1996, for example:

<img src="/http://www.ietf.org/images/ietflogo.gif">
<h1>Welcome to the Internet Engineering Task Force!</h1>
<p><hr><img src="http://www.ietf.org/redstar.gif"><a href="dvorak.html"> <b>IETF wins Dvorak Telecommunications Award</a></h1>
<p>
<a href="http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/home/jobs.html"><b>Employment Opportunity</a> with the IETF Secretariat.</b>

Today we have stuff like:

<div class="navbar-brand header__logo-container"><a class="text-light" href="https://www.ietf.org/"><img class="header__logo" src="IETF%20Introduction_files/ietf-logo.svg" alt="IETF logo"></a></div><div class="collapse navbar-collapse flex-wrap-reverse" id="navbarSupportedContent"><ul class="navbar-nav col-12 col-xl-auto justify-content-xl-center flex-grow"><li class="nav-item btn-group "><a href="https://www.ietf.org/about/" class="nav-link btn btn-dark text-white text-uppercase pe-1">About the IETF</a>

So, while what you say is true, it's hard to see a strategic advantage in formats that claim human-readability. The C in CBOR stands for "concise" and that is a valuable property.

(The Internet Archive's version of the IETF home page on 1996-11-06 is longer than the reconstructed extract above. The archive mangles the original HTML.)

     Brian