On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 7:32 AM, Torben Weis <[email protected]> wrote:
> Joe,
> I tend to disagree. Your argument is basically that a standalone standard
> should not depend on protobufs which are not standard.
Actually, I was arguing from a standards perspective because that
was easiest, it doesn't mean I can't argue it successfully from
every other perspective also :)
> I agree.
Actually, protobufs are used in the federation protocol and thus must
be standardized, so that's not really an option.
> However, if the standard says you should send
> { foo: <string>, bar : <number> }
> to the client you can as well specify that "foo" and "bar" are symbols which
> have to be replaced by "1" and "2" in the protocol.
> Thus, in the standard document you first use the symbol names to foster
> understanding and then you provide an encoding table which maps symbol names
> to numbers.
> Even ASN.1 does the same. They talk about tags, which are names. And then
> they tell how to encode these tags in bits.
> Furthermore, a communication protocol should not be designed to be readable.
> It should be designed to be precise, easy to implement, efficient and
> platform neutral.
We agree on much:
Precise - agreed
Easy to implement - very much agreed, which is why key names should be used
Platform neutral - agreed
Now on the efficiency front I don't disagree, I just believe the
efficiency gains are minimal and don't outweigh the benefits
of a readable protocol. If efficiency really is an overarching concern
then let's transport protocol buffers over websockets.
> Of course you may argue that a HTTP header has names for the header-entries,
> such as Content-Length instead of numbers and we survived this bandwidth
> abuse. True, but in Wave we are transmitting messages on a key-stroke level.
> There is a reason why you use WebSockets instead of good-old HTTP.
The odd thing is that you can use your points to argue that
we shouldn't be using XMPP for Federation.
Thanks,
-joe
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