Re: ASN.1 and XML

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

[Al Snell]

> 1) It's currently mandatory in ASN.1 that types have names starting with a
> capital letter, and values with a small letter. sually, value names map to
> XML element names - the things compromising an Address-typed element are
> called street city, and postcode so the elements are named after that,
> not "String". This is fine when you're encoding something with ASN.1 roots
> in XML, but how does that cope with an existing XML schema using capital
> letters on things that you convert to ASN.1? The case-of-first-letter
> thing will probably be dropped from "requirement" to "stylistic
> recommendation".
>

Yes, the case/naming can be a little iffy for automated processing.  Those
lower-case slots are really type labels too, as I understand it, aren't
they?  They will be assigned values in an instance but they are types in the
schema.  The difference is that they are locally-defined type labels whose
scope is limited, and they are used to define the type of a slot, not to
name an entire type definition.

BTW, Al, maybe you're the one to answer this, I've been wondering about it.
In view of the mandatory upper/lower case naming requirements, how can
someone create ASN.1 labels in a language that does not make that
distinction?  Or are you simply not allowed to name types using such
characters at all (which isn't so good for internationalization, I would
thnk)?

Cheers,

Tom P