Re: If not JSON, what then ?

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

Hi Poul,

(I'm only lurking in this WG because the HTTP protocols are useful for
certain IoT applications; however I do understand the design focus here
is more on browser-web/big-web applications.)

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> My personal intuition was that we should find a binary serialization
> (like CORS), 

I'm assuming here you mean CBOR?

> and base64 it into HTTP1-2:  Ie: design for the future
> and shoe-horn into the present.  But no obvious binary serialization
> seems to exist, CORS was panned by a number of people in the WS as
> too complicated, 

(If you are talking about CBOR:)
Well, it is more complicated than doing nothing.

Once a bespoke design of a data model and serialization is completed,
that is likely to be as complicated as CBOR (or even more).

The real problem is then that we have added another data model and
serialization of that data model to the overall complexity that needs to
be managed by a system that connects to the web.
(That may not make a difference for a browser, but it does for IoT and
other machine-to-machine applications.)

The specific data model that you have designed looks fine to me; it
should be representable in CBOR without problem.  What remains is the
cognitive dissonance of having done a base64(url) transformation, but as
you say that is not a real technical problem with HPACK.
(I am aware of the debugging advantages of text encoding, but these are
values that go into HTTP/2 headers and are obscured by HPACK, anyway.)

> and gag-reflexes were triggered by ASN.1.

I do sympathize here :-)

Grüße, Carsten