On 6 April 2015 at 12:20, Joe Hildebrand (jhildebr) <[email protected]> wrote:
> Do we have one of these transports in mind, by the way?

At least one: HTTP

CoAP too, I guess.

>>Saving the base64 encoding probably saves more bytes than moving to a 
>>completely
>>new format.
>
> Probably, but I'm also worried the need to keep the original text around 
> after parsing to avoid the need for canonicalization.  The extra memory 
> associated with that isn't a good fit for smaller devices, and is an 
> attractive nuisance for developer shortcuts.

I get the nuisance factor, but shortcuts only lead to signature
verification failure (including failure to verify).  Given that jose
has the exact same problem, I'm not super-concerned.

>>If you really cared about saving bytes, you would drop the text labels
>>and move to a schema-based binary encoding, or at least integer keys.
>
> ASN.1 is a schema-based binary encoding, so we already have one of those in 
> CMS.  Integer keys help, but help a lot more in an encoding that uses 1 byte 
> for the oft-used small integers (as CBOR does).

Don't make me get out the schema vs. encoding bat.  PER allows types
to consume <1 byte if you want to get aggressively parsimonious.

>>A format without OIDs could be extremely compact.  But part of the
>>point of JOSE is to avoid that muck, and the gains aren't significant.
>
> Aren't OID's just a particular approach for minting unique byte strings?  
> Registries and tag: URNs, are all other approaches in this space.

Indeed.  The reason I mentioned them is that they are especially
wasteful of bytes.

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