Re: What ASN.1 got right

Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com> Tue, 02 March 2021 02:44 UTC

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Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2021 20:44:01 -0600
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From: Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com>
To: Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>
Cc: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>, IETF-Discussion Discussion <ietf@ietf.org>
Subject: Re: What ASN.1 got right
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On Mon, Mar 01, 2021 at 06:40:35PM -0800, Tim Bray wrote:
> ASN.1 always had data types, and then XML came along, which had no data
> types but  a pretty good system for associating names with chunks of data,
> and successfully invaded most of ASN.1's space. At which point I concluded
> that it's more important to know something's name than its data type.

That's a good summary.  Though there's still a lot of input validation
to do, hence formalisms.