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<TITLE>RE: ASN.1</TITLE>
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<P><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">-----Original Message-----</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">From: </FONT></B> <FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">Julian Reschke [SMTP:reschke@medicaldataservice.de]</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">Sent: </FONT></B> <FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">Thursday, April 15, 1999 9:47 AM</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">To: </FONT></B> <FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">David Brownell; xml-dev@ic.ac.uk</FONT>
<BR><B><FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">Subject: </FONT></B> <FONT SIZE=1 FACE="Arial">RE: ASN.1</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> From: owner-xml-dev@ic.ac.uk [<U></U></FONT><U><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"><A HREF="mailto:owner-xml-dev@ic.ac.uk">mailto:owner-xml-dev@ic.ac.uk</A>]On</FONT></U><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"> Behalf Of</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> David Brownell</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 1999 7:01 PM</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> To: xml-dev@ic.ac.uk</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> Subject: Re: ASN.1</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">></FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">>...</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">></FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> And fourth, DER and BER are examples of a philosophy of protocol</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> development</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> that's been largely discredited for mainstream applications:</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> "bitstuffing".</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> It was a design principle that bit efficiency was more important than time</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> spent to encode or decode ... perhaps understandable for systems</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> using X.25</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> networks where you more or less paid by the byte, but not on a LAN or even</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> the Internet. Many folk think DER/BER should be the first to be</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> put against</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> the wall when the revolution (XML?) comes; they're that unpleasant to use.</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">></FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">> ...</FONT>
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<P><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">I would be extremely careful with this. There will always be a reason to</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">stick as much as data as possible into a your byte stream. Right now people</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">pay a premium in both performance and price for IP over cell phones, and</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">even if this gets better in a few years from now, there will always be yet</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">another case where you want optimal usage of your bandwidth (IP over</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">satellites for example).</FONT>
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<P><B><I><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial">[Nigel Hutchison]</FONT></I></B><I></I> <FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"> I would have thought that the best way of dealing with this issue is to use a "pleasant" syntax which was easy to process and implement another layer to compress the payload for transmission.</FONT></P>
<P><B><I><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"></FONT></I></B><I></I> <FONT COLOR="#0000FF" SIZE=2 FACE="Arial"></FONT> <FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">Nigel W. O. Hutchison</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">Chief Architect, Software AG Germany</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">Tel: +49 6151 92 1207</FONT>
<BR><FONT SIZE=2 FACE="Tahoma">Email nwoh@software-ag.de</FONT>
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