On 9 August 2013 19:52, Barry Leiba <barryleiba(_at_)computer(_dot_)org> wrote:
To the rest of the community: Does anyone else think it is not
appropriate to publish CBOR as a Proposed Standard, and see who uses
it?
I'm ambivalent on this point. I don't see CBOR as being useful, but I
don't believe that we should be setting the bar for PS so high that
this doesn't meet it.
To the rest of the community: What is your view of Phill's technical
arguments with CBOR? Do you agree that CBOR is flawed?
PHB's comments were valid. Though I'll point out that a clear
applicability statement is one potential way to allow something like
this to advance without directly addressing those concerns. I might
prefer that those concerns be addressed directly, but I also want a
pony.
To the rest of the community: Do you agree with that concern? Do you
think such an analysis and selection of common goals, leading to one
(or perhaps two) new binary encodings being proposed is what we should
be doing? Or is it acceptable to have work such as CBOR proposed
without that analysis?
I'm not 100% convinced either way in this case. I can see the
potential here for damage in either direction: choose one format and
it might not be applicable in a wide array of valid use cases; or
allow multiple, narrowly-focused formats and end up with no
consistency at all.
(CBOR attempts to cover several branches of the latter case, by
defining a narrowly-focused, but somewhat general-purpose mechanism
that can be arbitrarily extended.)
I'm also highly cynical regarding the ability of a working group to
produce anything that avoids these sorts of problems. I'm so glad
that I'm not an area director.