RE: What I see as problems to solve ... and a strawman solution

At 06:50 04/02/02 -0500, Shawn C. Masters wrote:

>         The problems you are describing with ASN.1 are really the problems
>with how it is used inside X.400.  It is capable of doing anything XML can
>do other then being easily human readable/writeable.  I wouldn't dismiss it.
>The basic advantages are large when lots of processing is required (like on
>a busy mail server).  Handling of binary data without encoding will reduce
>the bandwidth and processing footprint.  Encoding numbers and date/times
>prevents the requirement to reparse.

This is a small point, but numbers very rarely appear as datatypes
in email headers. Dates do appear, but for most purposes, using
an ISO-based format (2004-02-02T11:50:45) instead of the current
ad-hoc stuff (e.g. Mon, 2 Feb 2004 06:50:45 -0500) should
allow servers to do without decoding to binary.

Regards,   Martin.