Re: What does "persist" really mean ?
On Wed, 30 Jul 2008, Lew wrote:
Lew asked:
"Verbose" compared to what?
Tom Anderson wrote:
ASN.1.
Lew:
Tom:
None.
XML has many benefits as an serialization format, not least that it is
semantically void.
"Semantically void"?
It is also human-readable. I am not familiar with ASN.1, which may have
similar advantages.
Well, it's certainly not human-readable [1]. Nor, sadly, is its
specification!
XML is also infinitely extensible and self-describing. The verbosity
buys something.
ASN.1 has the same degree of self-describingness as XML. The two are
really very similar when you get down to it. Indeed, there is a degree of
interoperability:
http://asn1.elibel.tm.fr/xml/
tom
[1] Kinda. ASN.1 is actually not an encoding, but a sort of framework for
encoding, within which there are a few specific encodings. The standard
one is the Basic Encoding Rules, BER, which is binary, fairly compact, and
self-describing. There's also the Packed Encoding Rules, PER, which is
maximally compact, but not self-describing. I think there are also
human-readable formats (there's certainly an XML one), but that's not
usually what people mean when they say ASN.1.
--
roger and kay payne, symmetry, piercing, archaeology, position, in ,,