Re: Protest: Complexity running rampant

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no>]

--On 19. februar 2007 02:40 -0800 Fred Baker <fred at cisco.com> wrote:

> On Feb 19, 2007, at 1:55 AM, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
> > My attention has recently been drawn to this set of documents:
> >
> > - draft-legg-xed-asd
> > - draft-legg-xed-asd-gserei
> > - draft-legg-xed-asd-xerei
> > - draft-legg-xed-rxer
> > - draft-legg-xed-rxer-ei
> >
> > It's, as far as I can tell, an attempt at a complete
> > reimplementation of ASN.1 using XML.
>
> Stepping away from the details of the implementation, let me ask what the
> result is? (note that I am not an apps person, and have no skin the the
> game, and therefore am asking a question trying to get to the root here)
>
> There are any number of structured data representations around; ASN.1 and
> XML are two, and one could consider the structure used in RFC 2445 as a
> third example. People have shied away from ASN.1 citing complexity.
> Whatever its warts, XML is pretty readily understood.

I'd challenge that.... but there is experience that people are using XML 
successfully in applications. So I guess XML has proven itself.

> Having not read the above and not really caring much what happens in the
> layers up in the stratosphere as long as its designers don't by its sheer
> weight make the application unusable, is it a bad thing to provide the
> expressive nature of ASN.1 in a human-readable and popular data
> representation?

With the "expressive nature of ASN.1" comes every single piece of the 
complexity of ASN.1 that people have shied away from. And to this 
complexity, there is added the complexity of XML.

I have nothing against such things being published. Let foolishness fail on 
its own.

I have significant issues with using IETF cycles on developing and (not 
least) maintaining such a complex beast.

             Harald



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