- From: Nico Williams <nico@cryptonector.com>
- Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:50:11 -0600
- To: Frédéric Kayser <f.kayser@free.fr>
- Cc: Roberto Peon <grmocg@gmail.com>, ietf-http-wg@w3.org
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Frédéric Kayser <f.kayser@free.fr> wrote: > I find BOHE interesting but I don't like the idea of mixing what is basically ASCII text (7 bits values with most of the C0 control codes never used) and binary data (full 8 bits wide values, the way it's used in BOHE it also means a lot of values in the low end -near zero-). This is silly: we already have text and binary mixed all over the place, such as in DNS, PKIX, Kerberos, SSHv2, and so on, and that's never been a problem. And how else should we encode textual values in binary protocols anyways? (I mean, besides using a Unicode encoding rather than ASCII.) > An entropy coder will have to cope with a larger alphabet than just ASCII since it is "polluted" by binary data (if it appears infrequently it may end up taking more than 8-bits). Well, yes, so what? We already apply generic compression algorithms to so much mixed text and binary. Clearly information theory does not say it's impossible. Nico --
Received on Thursday, 17 January 2013 20:50:35 UTC