qlog: new streaming serialization format

[Robin MARX <[e-mail]>]

Hello everyone,

As discussed during IETF 111, we are looking to update qlog to move to a
new streaming serialization format.

The current version uses the "Newline Delimited JSON" (NDJSON) format for
event streaming, which, while it works well, is not an official standard
(in the IETF or elsewhere).

As such, it was proposed we move to the "JSON text-sequences" format
defined in RFC 7464 [1]. json-seq separates each record (qlog event in our
case) with the Record Separator character (\x1E) and a \n at the end. As
such, it should be easy to update an existing NDJSON implementation (as it
just requires outputting one additional character per event).

We have prototyped and tested this approach in qvis and various other tools
like jq and the early outcomes are looking good [2].

As such, we will be preparing a PR and associated draft-01 for IETF 112
that introduces this change.

In the meantime, it would be great if people interested in event streaming
or with existing NDJSON qlog stacks could look at the proposal/early
results [2] and provide feedback.

[1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7464
[2]: https://github.com/quicwg/qlog/issues/172


With best regards,
the qlog editors

P.S. note that we also still plan to keep the normal JSON non-streaming
format intact, leading to two "main" formats defined in the spec: 1) normal
JSON and 2) JSON text sequences.

-- 

dr. Robin Marx
Postdoc researcher - Web protocols
Expertise centre for Digital Media

*Cellphone *[phone]

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