- From: Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@innosoft.com>
- Date: Fri, 29 Jan 1999 10:39:29 -0800 (PST)
- To: Jacob Palme <jpalme@dsv.su.se>
- Cc: discuss@apps.ietf.org, SeniorOnline technical mailing list <sol-tech@ambra.omega.it>, SELECT EU project mailing list <select@dsv.su.se>
I'm very opinionated on the subject, so I'll gladly comment: On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Jacob Palme wrote: > Coding method which we are considering are: > > - XML (sent via HTTP). Advantage: Powerful, general-purpose, > a current fad. If you're working on structured documents, I would recommend using XML and DOM. While each of these two pieces is mediocre by itself, I suspect the combination of the two in a standards arena will be very valuable. For general metadata, XML is just a mediocre syntax (it'd be good if there weren't 6 ways to encode a character and junk like Processing Instructions and CDATA were cut). If simple A-V pairs will suffice, I'd go with RFC 822 style headers since they're more readable, but if nested structures are needed XML syntax isn't a bad choice. > - multipart/formdata (RFC 2388, RFC 1867). Advantage: > MIME-based, easy to produce test data since an ordinary > HTML form can be used. It tends to be hard to treat multipart MIME objects as single entities with current infrastructure. While I consider this a flaw in the current deployed infrastructure it would influence my choice. When passing around a collection of structured data, it's important to be able to treat that collection as a single independent entity at times. > - A variant of the DSN format (RFC 1894) This is a simplified version of RFC 822 style headers. A good choice if A-V pairs is all you need. > - CORBA I know almost nothing about it. My first impression is that it's trendy junk, but I could be wrong. > - A variant of LDAP, since some of the operations > we will define will be directory-type operations I'm not fond of ASN.1 binary encodings -- they're at least as hard as text (in programmer time) to marshal and unmarshal correctly, and require additional programmer time to build a debugging and testing infrastructure. If your data is very directory-oriented and likely to gateway to LDAP operations at times, I'd look at LDIF and/or text/directory. Most deployed LDAP servers have LDIF support for import/export. - Chris
Received on Friday, 29 January 1999 13:42:20 UTC