RE: ASN.1 and XML

["Al B. Snell" <alaric@alaric-snell.com>]

On Thu, 24 May 2001, Frank Richards wrote:

> > ASN.1 :-) XML is
> > only competition for ASN.1 because it's being pushed by hype; there's
> > nothing it can usefully do that couldn't be done as well or 
> > better before.
> 
> Publish a Book. Or website, or a CDROM. Or all three.
> 

Books: http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/book/index.htm and
http://www.isi.salford.ac.uk//books/osi/osi.html to start with.

Website: http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/en/introduction/index.htm is the
definitive, generally.

A CD-ROM / website with a nice open source ASN.1 toolkit and documentation
for same in DocBook, also published as an O'Reilly or similar, would be
nice - but I haven't got time, personally :-(

> > Another win of ASN.1 over XML is 15 years of practical 
> > experience using it
> > in the real world. That's hard to beat :-)
> 
> ISO 8879 __1986__

I see your 1986 and raise you two years! X.409 __1984__ and ISO 8824 /
8825 __1987__! And that's real ASN.1, ISO 8879 is SGML, which despite
being far more complex is but a pale shadow of XML+schemas; it was never
intended as a notation for data interchange, just documents... it's about
wrapping elements around text to "mark it up". In a structured, general,
way.

Stuff like groves seems to suggest that some people were having XML-like
ideas for SGML before XML came along, but it never took off; ASN.1 was a
data transport at heart since 1984 [not that it was called ASN.1 until
it became an ISO standard in 1987, though] :-)

> 
> Frank
> 

ABS

-- 
                               Alaric B. Snell
 http://www.alaric-snell.com/  http://RFC.net/  http://www.warhead.org.uk/
   Any sufficiently advanced technology can be emulated in software