On Jul 30, 2013, at 09:05, Martin Thomson
<martin(_dot_)thomson(_at_)gmail(_dot_)com> wrote:
What would cause this to be tragic, is if publication of this were
used to prevent other work in this area from subsequently being
published.
Indeed.
As Paul and I have repeatedly said, CBOR is not trying to be the final,
definitive, binary object representation for all purposes. It was written to
some specific objectives, clearly stated in the document. It is being proposed
for standards-track because specific ongoing work that works well with these
objectives will benefit greatly from being able to reference a common
specification. If the objectives for other work are different, that work may
benefit from using a different format, existing or newly designed.
We had some offline discussion of what can be done to make this more apparent
from the document, and decided to start at the most visible part, the abstract.
In -04, the abstract says:
The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a data format
whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small code
size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the need
for version negotiation. These design goals make it different from
earlier binary serializations such as ASN.1 and MessagePack.
Now this seemed fairly clear to the authors, but without context it might be
read as trying to be the final, end-all format because it only talks about
earlier formats.
We propose to fix this (at the danger of being slightly tautological) by making
it clear other formats will be created in the future:
The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) is a data format
whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small code
size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the need
for version negotiation. These design goals make it different from
earlier binary serializations such as ASN.1 and MessagePack, or other
binary serializations that may be created in the future.
Serialization/encoding of data structures for transmission continues to be an
exciting (if sometimes arcane) subject of computer science and its long history
will not end with CBOR.
(CC to ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org because some discussion there appears to be
related.)
Grüße, Carsten