> Each byte array in <1> begins with a byte which represents the type of > data in the field (hash, encryption key, DBR, etc.).
This seems to me to be solving a bunch of non-problems. Advantages (paraphrased): Hides information from the user so that they won't mess with it No weird escaping No key type specifiers Unordered fields Easy to parse I don't see hiding information from the user to be a good thing. Users aren't going mess with their URLs and then complain that they don't work. I find the whole issue of hiding data from the user to be a useless occupation. No weird escaping is defintely a good thing. However, using the ?& is better since it's completely standard as well as not requiring weird escaping (? and & have to be escaped if they are contained in the key, but we have to support % escaping anyway if we want to support the standard URL syntax). I think key type specifiers are good. Users should know the difference between different key types and know which they are using. Do we want it to be difficult for a user to tell the difference between a KSK and a CHK? No. Unordered fields. I don't see this as a benefit. However, ?& syntax allows for this anyway. Easy to parse. Well, syntactically, yes, it's very easy. It's kind of semantically weird because you're mixing binary and text formats in a single string. It's going to be a little more complicated to parse because you now have to do your lexical tokenizing, then strip off the type byte, and then interpret the result. With ?& syntax you only do lexical tokenizing and in many languages there is probably a language which will parse the parameters and convert it into a hashtable of name-value pairs. So you don't have to do any parsing at all, and you can't get easier than that. So the basic advantage of this syntax is that it hides data from the user. I don't see any advantage to hiding data from the user. Also, ?& syntax is standardized and parsers already exist for it. _______________________________________________ Devl mailing list Devl at freenetproject.org http://lists.freenetproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devl >From devl-admin at freenetproject.org Sun Apr 8 05:50:48 2001 Return-Path: <devl-admin at freenetproject.org> Received: from hawk.freenetproject.org (postfix@[4.18.42.11]) by funky.danky.com (8.9.3/8.8.7) with ESMTP id FAA09650 for <danello at danky.com>; Sun, 8 Apr 2001 05:50:48 -0400 Received: from hawk.freenetproject.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by hawk.freenetproject.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 00EC8580C8; Sun, 8 Apr 2001 02:33:05 -0700 (PDT)
