RE: [xml-dev] Is it time for the binary XML permathread to start up agai

[Alessandro Triglia <sandro@mclink.it>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Michael Kay [mailto:mike@saxonica.com] 
> Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 05:35
> Subject: RE: [xml-dev] Is it time for the binary XML 
> permathread to start up again?
> 
> I had a use for it once, back in the 1980s, until I 
> discovered that a parser would cost more than the entire 
> project budget. The standards that succeed are those that 
> come with free software....


Even though XML Schema is more popular today, ASN.1 has been around for over 20 years and has been used in many standards in telecommunications and in other areas of technology.

ASN.1 is still alive and well.  I did a little research a few months ago and found 11 recently completed or current standards projects (within various SDOs) where ASN.1 is being used in a normative way, plus a few others where its use has been proposed.  Some of those projects are new versions of existing standards that already used ASN.1, but others are new standards.  (Of course there may be other instances that I am not aware of.)  But the use of ASN.1 is not limited to standards--there are also recent examples of use of ASN.1 in private specifications within some organizations.

The issue of free tools is not that simple.  Over the years there have been several open source projects for ASN.1 tools.  I don’t know how many people use those free tools today, though there may be a few.  We hear more about people using either commercial tools, or homemade tools, or homemade ad-hoc encoder/decoders for specific protocols.

As for the prices of commercial products, I believe that prices today are much lower than they were in the 80's.

Alessandro Triglia
OSS Nokalva
www.oss.com