xml-dev - XML encoding ASN.1 (was Re: Another Question)

["Peter Jacobi" <pj@walter-graphtek.com>]

Tom, All,

tpassin@home.com wrote:
> I'm involved right now in XML encoding rules for a subset of ASN.1 (for a
> particular problem domain).  Since I have only a slight reading
> acquaintance ASN.1, it's been even more interesting.  One of the
> interesting issues is that ASN.1 has both named data types and named
> identifiers (an element has both a type and an identifier), but in XML you
> have only element names (basically representing complex data types).  So
> do you use identifiers or data type names, and what do you do with the
> other of the pair?  There are a lot of possible solutions.

Two possibilities, I prefer:

a) use the tags as element names ("A17" for [APPLICATION 17]),
use fixed attributes for identifiers and data type names.

b) use the identifiers as element names, use fixed attributes for tags and 
data type names.

Note 1: You may want to use a separte namespace for each 
SEQUENCE or CHOICE to match naming rules (I wonder, what the xml-
uri guys think of this).

Note 2: You can have situations were several data type or possible for an 
element, so the attribute isn't always fixed.

Regards,
Peter Jacobi

***************************************************************************
This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers.
To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@xml.org&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev
List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/
***************************************************************************