Re: CBOR Tutorial

There are a few informative discussions on this in the Web Packaging repository:

* "Switch to binary format and more." https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/38
* "Inclusion of binary data into a text-based format" https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/10


Cited reasons (as far as I can tell):

* The TAG proposal proved to be more complex to implement than anticipated. Formats like CBOR or DER have pre-existing implementations and are used in other standards so browsers have to support them anyway.
* A good portion of resources packaged are going to be binaries so a binary format would lead to considerable space savings over a text format

Because of the ubiquity of compressed/gzipped HTTP responses and how the package stores responses, many text entries in a package will be stored compressed as binaries and not text.


There’s also a discussion of whether to switch away from CBOR to DER for more secure parsing and better error handling:

* "Consider switching to DER-encoded ASN.1" https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/47

But based on that discussion it seems likely that they’ll stick to CBOR as that’s a simpler format.


Also relevant:

“Explain why we're not using ZIP” https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/issues/45

- best
- Baldur Bjarnason
  baldur@rebus.foundation



> On 30 Jan 2018, at 14:33, Ivan Herman <ivan@w3.org> wrote:
> 
> Romain,
> 
> that is true. But the question is: what is the advantage of using CBOR over simply transferring the original resource data (just like the original document of the TAG proposed)?
> 
> Ivan
> 
> ---
> Ivan Herman
> Tel:+31 641044153
> http://www.ivan-herman.net
> 
> (Written on mobile, sorry for brevity and misspellings...)
> 
> 
> 
> On 30 Jan 2018, at 20:04, Romain <rdeltour@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On 30 Jan 2018, at 19:11, Schindler Wolfgang Dr. <w.schindler@pons.de> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Am I right then that for a content document in HTML CBOR only means a 1:1 translation of UTF-8 codes into a binary format that would have exactly the same file size. If this is true, I’m afraid I don’t see (yet?) the connection to Web Packaging and the rationale for exchanging a human-readable format for a binary format. Or do I perhaps miss decisive goodies?
>> 
>> With CBOR and Jeffrey’s spec, you can *bundle* resources together and exchange them as one cohesive resource. Since a publication is a *collection* of multiple resources, we need a format to package them.
>> 
>> Romain.
>>

Received on Tuesday, 30 January 2018 20:12:33 UTC