> >But the main motivation (imho) is that it's trendy. And once anyone > >proposes a heavyweight "standard" encoding, anyone who opposes it is > >labeled a Luddite.
Maybe. But there's quite a lot to be said for standards which lead to widespread availability of tools implementing them, both, open source and otherwise. One of the arguments we've heard for why ASN.1 sucks is the lack of tools, particularly open source ones, for ASN.1 and its encodings. Nowadays there is one GPL ASN.1 compiler and libraries: SNACC. (I'm not sure if it's output is unencumbered, like bison, or what, but that's important to a large number of developers who don't want to be forced to license under GPL, and there's not any full-featured ASN.1 compilers and libraries licensed under the BSD or BSD-like licenses.) The situation is markedly different with XML. Even if you don't like XML, or its redundancy (as an encoding, but then, see FastInfoSet, a PER-based encoding of XML), it has that going for it: tool availability. Nico -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
