RE: ASN.1 for the Internet (was Re: Compressed data type for S/MIME)

It is worthwhile to use a formalism to express the
syntax of IETF protocols. It would be much better to 
capture both syntax and semantics and this is easy 
enough using augmented finite state machines and such.

Using ASN.1 for the task would be futile. It would 
be like trying to convert a steam locomotive to run
on roads.

I wrote a synthesizer for most of the IETF protocols
back in '92 which covered SMTP, NNTP, FTP and of course
HTTP. The data structure it used was pretty simple as
I recall - about ten pages in all. If folk are interested 
I might be able to find it.

                Phill