Is this a concern for real applications, things other than pretty printers and protocol dumpers? I agree that it makes it difficult to understand the content without a format description, but it's no worse than some proprietary encoding. Is translating into XML without knowing the "language" of the format something that needs to be done? I would have thought that anything that isn't understood should be left as a "black box" blob for a downstream decoder to handle. You get similar things in XML where there might be a <Base64Certificate>MIIB...=</Base64Certificate>.
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Schwartz Sent: Thursday, 8 September 2005 4:56 PM To: openssl-users@openssl.org Subject: RE: OCSP, Nonce and the requestExtensions > I understood what will be the encoding when we use explicit & implicit > tagging. that is what you explained. > But what i really want to know is - In which context we will use > explict tagging & in which context we will use implicit tagging. If one or the other is specified in a protocol, use that. For reasons I don't agree with but that I have to live with, implicit tagging is almost always used. Explicit tagging is only used when implicit tagging is not possible. The case where implicit tagging is not possible is when something that does not understand the protocol nevertheless needs to decode the data in the objects. I fact this situation all the time, and it's why I *hate* implicit tagging. Save a few bytes, tremendously increase complexity. Welcome to implicit tagging. Consider a parser that's supposed to turn BER into XML. With explicit tagging, it's trivial to turn [ 3 [ INTEGER 7 ] ] Into <object><type>3</type><integer>7</integer></object> But with implicit tagging, how do you turn [ 3 7 ] Into XML if you don't know that '3' means integer *in* *this* *context*. Result: with implicit tagging you have to understand the high level protocol to make sense of the low level protocol. That's a horrible shame, IMO. DS ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ OpenSSL Project http://www.openssl.org User Support Mailing List openssl-users@openssl.org Automated List Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED]
