Re: [hybi] WS ABNF

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

Dave Cridland wrote:
> 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.

Well, it is similar in that it's a variable length encoding.

But you are right (and before I didn't play close enough attention) that 
it's yet another new encoding, that people need to learn.

> ...

BR, Julian