Sure, I'm not discounting the value of being able to do pretty printing. I was just thinking about using the decoded data further than that, and in all situations I can think of knowing the data format is important (and a given). Even with XML, where you could use XPATH/XQUERY to drill down into the decoded structure, without any knowledge of the structure it's not going to be very useful other than being able to print all INTEGERs with something along the lines of "select */INTEGER".
I suspect that the reason for favouring implicit over explicit tagging came from the fact that it uses less octets. For my use of ASN.1 the extra octets that outright explict use would cause aren't a problem, but for the telecoms that ASN.1 was developed for it is a genuine concern, where more data per channel means less concurrent channels. ASN.1 is still a whole lot better than a proprietary format where you get _nothing_ without knowledge of the specific data format, but it's no XML in this respect (though thankfully doesn't suffer the same bloat). -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David Schwartz Sent: Friday, 9 September 2005 8:03 AM To: openssl-users@openssl.org Subject: RE: OCSP, Nonce and the requestExtensions > 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 ______________________________________________________________________ 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]
