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Re: Protest: Complexity running rampant

Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com> Mon, 19 February 2007 10:40 UTC

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From: Fred Baker <fred@cisco.com>
Date: Mon, 19 Feb 2007 02:40:15 -0800
To: Harald Alvestrand <harald@alvestrand.no>
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Subject: Re: Protest: Complexity running rampant
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On Feb 19, 2007, at 1:55 AM, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> My attention has recently been drawn to this set of documents:
>
> - draft-legg-xed-asd
> - draft-legg-xed-asd-gserei
> - draft-legg-xed-asd-xerei
> - draft-legg-xed-rxer
> - draft-legg-xed-rxer-ei
>
> It's, as far as I can tell, an attempt at a complete  
> reimplementation of ASN.1 using XML.

Stepping away from the details of the implementation, let me ask what  
the result is? (note that I am not an apps person, and have no skin  
the the game, and therefore am asking a question trying to get to the  
root here)

There are any number of structured data representations around; ASN.1  
and XML are two, and one could consider the structure used in RFC  
2445 as a third example. People have shied away from ASN.1 citing  
complexity. Whatever its warts, XML is pretty readily understood.

Having not read the above and not really caring much what happens in  
the layers up in the stratosphere as long as its designers don't by  
its sheer weight make the application unusable, is it a bad thing to  
provide the expressive nature of ASN.1 in a human-readable and  
popular data representation?

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