clarifications on the use of Unknown Sized Elements

Dave Rice <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.multimedia.matroska.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi all,
I wanted to get some more discussion to finish documentation on the Element Data Size. Some discussion is at:

# The pull request for Data Size documentation
https://github.com/Matroska-Org/ebml-specification/pull/15

# Prior listserv thread concerning the Data Size section of Martin Nilsson's RFC Draft
http://lists.matroska.org/pipermail/matroska-devel/2015-April/004647.html

# Earlier pull request (closed without commit because it was too messy, incorporated copy-written text)
https://github.com/Matroska-Org/ebml-specification/pull/3

So clarify (my) presumptions:
- Only Elements that are Master-elements may use an unknown size.
- I'm saying that "An Element Data Size with all VINT\_DATA bits set to one is reserved as an indicator that the size of the Element is unknown." Thus a VINT_DATA of 0b1111111 is unknown as well as 0b11111111111111 as well as any one-filled VINT_DATA for any length supported by the Element.

For clarification:

- When is the Element of Unknown Size ended. In discussions (in github, mailing list, and irc) there has been two answers to this:
	1. Upon the first occurrence of an Element that is not a valid sub-element of the unknown-sized element.
	2. Upon the first occurrence of an Element that is at the same or a higher level than the one with an infite size

Under option 1 an occurrence of SimpleTag within another SimpleTag of unknown size DOES NOT indicate the end of the parent SimpleTag element.
Under option 2 an occurrence of SimpleTag within another SimpleTag of unknown size DOES indicate the end of the parent SimpleTag element.
Which option is the correct intention of EBML?

- Dependency on Schema
For the SimpleTag option available, the interpretation of the ending of the element presumes that the parse has knowledge of the EBML Schema/Profile of mastroska in any version 1-4. I'd like to include some statement to say that the use of an element of unknown size requires the use of the corresponding schema. For instance a pure EBML parser (without knowledge of the matroska schema) would not be able to parse a matroska document with an unknown size because it wouldn't be able to 'know' what elements are valid endings to the unknown-sized element.

In the latest PR, https://github.com/Matroska-Org/ebml-specification/pull/15,  I put this phrase:

> The use of Elements of unknown size is dependent on the    
> definition of the EBML Schema declared in DocType, because an Element of    
> unknown size can not be parsed without a complete list of all possible    
> sub-elements.

In conversion on the PR, Steve said this statement is incorrect: https://github.com/Matroska-Org/ebml-specification/pull/15#discussion_r31696905, but I am not certain how to best resolve it. Suggestions? Should I make reference to the need to have the associated schema to be able to parse unknown-sized elements of ebml documents?
Dave
_______________________________________________
Matroska-devel mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.matroska.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/matroska-devel
Read Matroska-Devel on GMane: http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.multimedia.matroska.devel
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.