> Is this a concern for real applications, things other than pretty printers
> and protocol dumpers?
Yes.
> 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?
Yes. A generic BER->XML converter and XML->BER converter would be very
handy. That would easily let people interact with a variety of BER
applications even in languages that don't manipulate raw binary very well.
Another example is a C++ BER decoder. When an integer is received, it is
expected to decode it into its integral value. But how can it do that if it
can't tell what's an integer and what isn't?
> I would have
> thought that anything that isn't understood should be left as a
> "black box"
> blob for a downstream decoder to handle.
The idea is to be able to convert BER encoded integers from the BER
binary
form to host form in once place. The idea is to convert BER encoded floating
point values, bit streams, strings, and the like into the appropriate native
format once, when they're received.
It's a horrible mixing of layers to have the protocol engine receive
decoded objects from the BER decoder and then have to pass objects into
another BER decoder (or back into it), once it figured out what type they
were.
How fun would it be to code, say, a telnet server if TCP required a
similar
mechanism?
> You get similar things in XML
> where there might be a <Base64Certificate>MIIB...=</Base64Certificate>.
I don't think they're really similar because it's not clear there's a
better way in this case. It's obvious that BER can provide a better way --
explicit typing. Frankly, I think it's a real shame the BER specification
didn't say that if you want to send a BER-encoded integer, you should do it
in an object of type INTEGER.
DS
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