Re: [hybi] WS ABNF

[Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>]

On Tue Feb 16 09:05:21 2010, Julian Reschke wrote:
> Dave Cridland wrote:
>> ...
>> But the chances of this making a measurable difference are very  
>> slim, whereas the perils of decoding a new integer representation  
>> seem extraordinarily high, especially given that it's a nicely  
>> unbounded integer. IMAP implementations used to have enough  
>> trouble when asked to allocate 4G for a literal, after all, but at  
>> least I'm unaware of them having decoding difficulty. OTOH, with 5  
>> octets, I can now setup a frame length of 32G, and I can't see  
>> anything suggesting that this is even a bad idea, let alone  
>> illegal protocol.
>> ...
> 
> It's not really new; something similar (or even the same thing?) is  
> used in HTTP chunked encoding.

Chunked uses a (straightforward, if excitingly unique) ASCII hex  
representation of the size of the following chunk, and chunked  
terminates with an empty chunk (and the trailer).

I don't see that as similar in the slightest, I'm afraid.

It's passingly similar to UTF-8 codepoints, I suppose, and something  
about it nags me into thinking of BER, and the self-termination is  
vaguely reminiscent of the encoding used for codepoints in punycode,  
albeit not nearly as clever.

But UTF-8, BER, and Punycode all have good reasons for their  
encodings. I see no good reason for inventing a new one here - but  
this may simply be that I've missed the discussion. Feel free to  
educate me. :-)

Dave.
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