ASN.1

[Kay Michael]

> At the risk of touching off a religious war, I'd not suggest anyone
> inflict ASN.1 on themselves, ever!  

As one who has used ASN.1 in the past and uses XML now, I agree absolutely.
Though I do regret that the designers of XML didn't include some of the
nicer features of ASN.1, specifically data typing.

There are actually two problems with the "bitstuffing" style of encoding:
firstly it's terribly hard to write the code to generate it and parse it;
secondly you only have to get one bit wrong and the guy at the other end
can't extract anything from your message. We spent years getting X.400 mail
systems to interoperate as a result.

Mike Kay

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