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On Tuesday 25 February 2003 18:43, Tim Bray wrote:
> Alaric B. Snell wrote:
> > ASN.1 doesn't constrain representation, it's purely an Abstract Syntax
> > Notation - it lists what information content something has, and nothing
> > more.
>
> And, as a result, it offers poor interoperability relative to good old
> Unicode-with-angle-brackets.  (My personal experience, yours may vary).

LDAP, SNMP, SSL, the phone network... nah, none of those interoperate very 
well, do they? And I bet XML carries *way* more traffic than the *phone 
network*, so it couldn't *posisbly* be interoperably transferring less data 
from day to day than ASN.1 systems :-)

ASN.1 has been around for a long time. There are lots of applications using 
it; I'm pretty damned confident that there is more BER being transferred in a 
day than XML. Sure, ASN.1 applications they tend to be in big important 
systems that run countries rather than in the hands of desperate Perl hackers 
(and this fact is reflected in the state of the market for ASN.1 tools...), 
but just because you don't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

> -Tim

ABS

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A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
 - ARP

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