Re: Abbreviated Tag Names (ASN.1)

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

Charles Reitzel wrote -


> Surely, ASN.1 is preferable to inventing a new set of binary encodings for
> XML Schema data types.
>

There are several drawbacks to using asn.1, though.

- There's not such a range of freely available tools - compilers and decoders,
especially - in such a variety of languages, as best as I can tell.

- You almost can't check asn.1 by hand; it's certainly much harder than for
xml documents.

- There's no standard way to translate between asn.1 and xml, and their data
models are not fully congruent.

-A  DTD cannot specifiy enough restrictions to give you an exact literal
translation of asn.1  You have to decide to give up something.  This may not
matter too much for data that starts out as xml though.  Also, it looks like
xml schemas will let you get very close to asn. in terms of describing data
structures.

Just calling a standard compression library like zip would certainly be
easier.    A lot depends on how important reducing the byte count in a message
is.  Remember that the requirements for XML included the statement that
"terseness" in XML markup is "of minimal importance."

Cheers,

Tom P