At 06:50 04/02/02 -0500, Shawn C. Masters wrote:
The problems you are describing with ASN.1 are really the problems
with how it is used inside X.400. It is capable of doing anything XML can
do other then being easily human readable/writeable. I wouldn't dismiss it.
The basic advantages are large when lots of processing is required (like on
a busy mail server). Handling of binary data without encoding will reduce
the bandwidth and processing footprint. Encoding numbers and date/times
prevents the requirement to reparse.
This is a small point, but numbers very rarely appear as datatypes
in email headers. Dates do appear, but for most purposes, using
an ISO-based format (2004-02-02T11:50:45) instead of the current
ad-hoc stuff (e.g. Mon, 2 Feb 2004 06:50:45 -0500) should
allow servers to do without decoding to binary.
Regards, Martin.