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On Nov 25, 2003, at 5:51 PM, Alaric B Snell wrote:
> 2) Write an XML DTD and use an off the shelf toolkit
>
> ...while apparently not realising that there are toolkits like ONC XDR
> that are probably still more widely available than XML parsers, and
> things like IFF and ASN.1.
... with the most significant difference between XML and the other
options being the copious availability of good free software for many
language/platform combinations XML. As long as this difference
obtains, these endless discussions of the relative benefits of XML and
ASN.1, or the utility of ASN.1 as a transfer format, will remain
profoundly uninteresting.
I'm serious: ASN.1 is of no interest whatsoever to the broader
community for any purpose whatsoever until there's some software. The
contrapositive may not be true, i.e. even given software, there may be
some as-yet-unforeseen problem that keeps ASN.1 from becoming
ubiquitous. But until there's some software it's all just empty
verbiage.
Cheers, Tim Bray http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/
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