xml-dev - RE: ASN.1

["Hutchison, Nigel" <nwoh@software-ag.de>]

Title: RE: ASN.1

-----Original Message-----
From:   Julian Reschke [SMTP:reschke@medicaldataservice.de]
Sent:   Thursday, April 15, 1999 9:47 AM
To:     David Brownell; xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
Subject:        RE: ASN.1

> From: owner-xml-dev@ic.ac.uk [mailto:owner-xml-dev@ic.ac.uk]On Behalf Of
> David Brownell
> Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 1999 7:01 PM
> To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk
> Subject: Re: ASN.1
>
>...
>
> And fourth, DER and BER are examples of a philosophy of protocol
> development
> that's been largely discredited for mainstream applications:
> "bitstuffing".
> It was a design principle that bit efficiency was more important than time
> spent to encode or decode ... perhaps understandable for systems
> using X.25
> networks where you more or less paid by the byte, but not on a LAN or even
> the Internet.  Many folk think DER/BER should be the first to be
> put against
> the wall when the revolution (XML?) comes; they're that unpleasant to use.
>
> ...

I would be extremely careful with this. There will always be a reason to
stick as much as data as possible into a your byte stream. Right now people
pay a premium in both performance and price for IP over cell phones, and
even if this gets better in a few years from now, there will always be yet
another case where you want optimal usage of your bandwidth (IP over
satellites for example).

[Nigel Hutchison]   I would have thought that the best way of dealing with this issue is to use a "pleasant" syntax which was easy to  process and implement another layer to compress the payload for transmission.

  Nigel W. O. Hutchison
Chief Architect, Software AG Germany
Tel: +49 6151 92 1207
Email nwoh@software-ag.de