> I guess I just haven't come across a case in practice (other than pretty
> printing) where I needed to decode without knowledge of the format of the
> data.
Pretty printing can be an important part of testing, debugging, and
securing.
> I also feel that there are worse things done with ASN.1, from the
> standpoint of being able to parse the data in it's entirety without
> knowledge of the format,
I'm not asking to be able to parse the data in its entirety. Just to be
able to identify the objects that I can parse. I can parse BER integers, so
I'd like to be able to find them.
> that make this implicit tagging issue pale in
> comparison, such as encoding entire objects into an OCTET STRING
> member of a
> structure. The value of an X.509 extension is a good example
> where, even in
> the absence of implicit tagging, the content of the extension value is
> largely unknown:
>
> Extension ::= SEQUENCE {
> extnID OBJECT IDENTIFIER,
> critical BOOLEAN DEFAULT FALSE,
> extnValue OCTET STRING }
I'm wouldn't say this is worse, I would say it is another example of the
same thing.
DS
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