Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
I was wondering:
What is considered best practice for encoding data in protocols within
the IETF's purview?
One should always think about what one needs and choose the appropriate
solution to the task. Of course sometimes it's hard to take into
account what level of performance one would need out of a protocol
implementation. RAM is considerably cheaper now than it was twenty
years ago, and so one approach in protocol design would be to define
multiple encodings as they are required. So, if you don't think
performance is crucial but toolset reuse is for an RPC-based approach,
perhaps XML is a good start, and if you need to optimize later, perhaps
consider something more compact like XDR.
As to whether ASN.1 was a good choice or a bad choice for SNMP, there
never was an argument. It was THE ONLY CHOICE. All three protocols
(CMIP, SGMP, HEMP) under consideration made use of it. Nobody
seriously considered anything else due to the practical limits of the
time. Is it still a reasonable approach? I think a strong argument
could be made that some sort of textual representation is necessary in
order to satisfy more casual uses and to accommodate tool sets that are
more broadly utilized, but that doesn't mean that we should do away with
ASN.1, archaic as it may seem.
Eliot
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