RE: Alternative formats for IDs

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Hi,

> What we are seeing is increasing use of fully automated tools 
> that don't
> have humans identifying which octets are MIB and which are 
> code.  You can't
> do that with plain ASCII.

MIB modules may be a bad example for you to use. All MIB modules start
with a BEGIN character string and end with an END character string.
Plain ASCII works perfectly well for this purpose. Binary formatted
documents, such as MS-Word and PDF, require much more work from the
tools  to find those BEGIN and END statements.

David Harrington
dbharrington@xxxxxxxxxxx

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Rosen [mailto:br@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Tuesday, January 10, 2006 8:09 AM
> To: 'Theodore Ts'o'
> Cc: ietfdbh@xxxxxxxxxxx; 'John C Klensin'; 'Marshall 
> Eubanks'; ietf@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: RE: Alternative formats for IDs
> 
> It's trivial for a human, but not for a computer.
> Many things trivial for humans are not trivial for computers.
> 
> The kind of harvesting you are talking about is trivial for a 
> human from any
> format as long as your editor can paste while losing formatting.
> 
> What we are seeing is increasing use of fully automated tools 
> that don't
> have humans identifying which octets are MIB and which are 
> code.  You can't
> do that with plain ASCII.
> 
> Your statement that the IETF is getting populated with people 
> who don't code
> is true.  It's a fact, and we need to adapt.  Most (but not 
> all) of the
> people who design protocols these days don't code; they have 
> people who work
> with them who do.  Part of that is unavoidable.  The part I 
> regret, which
> could be avoided, is the loss of "running code" that we used 
> to care about.
> Another thread.
> 
> Brian
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Theodore Ts'o [mailto:tytso@xxxxxxx] 
> Sent: Monday, January 09, 2006 11:37 PM
> To: Brian Rosen
> Cc: ietfdbh@xxxxxxxxxxx; 'John C Klensin'; 'Marshall 
> Eubanks'; ietf@xxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: Alternative formats for IDs
> 
> On Sat, Jan 07, 2006 at 03:18:08PM -0500, Brian Rosen wrote:
> > Any format can be used for any purpose, but it might be 
> time to fully
> stand
> > up to requirements to harvest data, and to recognize (as I 
> did on another
> > side thread), that reading is getting harder and harder for 
> ASCII.  It may
> > be a decent archive format still, but I'm not sure it's 
> going to stay that
> > way.
> 
> Huh?  "Harvesting data" from ASCII, in terms of pulling out MIB's to
> be fed into MIB compiler, or reference C code for algorithms like
MD5
> (RFC 1321) is *trivial* under ASCII.  Last I checked, C compilers
and
> MIB compilers still use ASCII text as input, and not Word documents
or
> XML documents.  Maybe part of what is going on is that IETF is
getting
> populated with people who aren't close to coding as much as before?
> You can get perfectly decent text editors for all operating systems,
> even Windows.
> 
> And even Word can import text (i.e., plain ASCII) documents Just
Fine.
> 
> 							- Ted
> 
> 
> 



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