ASN.1

[Stephen D. Williams]

Kay Michael wrote:

> > 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.

I put in my time on X.400/X.500/ISO stacks many years ago...

We are SOOO lucky that SMTP/Mime/Internet mail won out.

Not to mention TCP/IP vs. ISO stacks...

sdw

> Mike Kay
>
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