Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: > I was wondering: > > What is considered best practice for encoding data in protocols within > the IETF's purview? One should always think about what one needs and choose the appropriate solution to the task. Of course sometimes it's hard to take into account what level of performance one would need out of a protocol implementation. RAM is considerably cheaper now than it was twenty years ago, and so one approach in protocol design would be to define multiple encodings as they are required. So, if you don't think performance is crucial but toolset reuse is for an RPC-based approach, perhaps XML is a good start, and if you need to optimize later, perhaps consider something more compact like XDR. As to whether ASN.1 was a good choice or a bad choice for SNMP, there never was an argument. It was THE ONLY CHOICE. All three protocols (CMIP, SGMP, HEMP) under consideration made use of it. Nobody seriously considered anything else due to the practical limits of the time. Is it still a reasonable approach? I think a strong argument could be made that some sort of textual representation is necessary in order to satisfy more casual uses and to accommodate tool sets that are more broadly utilized, but that doesn't mean that we should do away with ASN.1, archaic as it may seem. Eliot _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf