::scr Ramblings of a Classic Refugee or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love OS X

[David Cantrell]

On Wed, Feb 06, 2002 at 11:47:25AM +0000, Alaric Snell wrote:
> On Wednesday 06 February 2002 11:33, you wrote:
> 
> > > Why just make ASCII special? Why not start with something a little higher
> > > level, like BER?
> >
> > For the reasons outlined earlier - you need something that is universally
> > acessible, which ASCII is and BER isn't.
> 
> BER is pretty universally accessible... you can download free tools to decode 
> it for display

I don't need to download a tool to use ASCII.  I don't need to learn a new
tool.  I can send the file to anyone anywhere and they'll be able to use
it too.  Using BER is wrong for the same reasons that using CP/M formatted
floppy disks is wrong.  Yes, there are free tools available to manipulate
them, but it is erecting unnecessary barriers.

>                and ASCII can't represent many foreign languages, so is not 
> something I would try to build any kind of serious data interchange upon!
> 
> LDAP and SNMP are both based on BER. Those protocols have hardly failed, have 
> they? NFS and YP use XDR, and nobody moans that NFS is hard to debug because 
> it's not in plain text.

True, NFS is hard to debug because it's too damned complex in all sorts
of other ways :-)

>                         Because when you're dealing with an XDR, you use an 
> XDR tool. Having to download something rather than using Notepad is just not 
> a problem in practice!

Actually it is.  It is reasonable for me to trust tools such as vim on
servers, and let's not forget, you've got it already, you need it already,
and everyone knows it.  It is not, IMO, reasonable to use some odd tool
designed for use with a complex data format, which would not be needed
were it not for that weird format, which no-one knows, and which requires
seventeen gigabytes of libraries just so it can load a file.

-- 
David Cantrell | david@cantrell.org.uk | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david

    Usenet is a co-operative venture, backed by nasty people.
    Follow the standards.
      -- Chris Rovers, in the Monastery