On 9 August 2013 19:52, Barry Leiba <barryleiba@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > To the rest of the community: Does anyone else think it is not > appropriate to publish CBOR as a Proposed Standard, and see who uses > it? I'm ambivalent on this point. I don't see CBOR as being useful, but I don't believe that we should be setting the bar for PS so high that this doesn't meet it. > To the rest of the community: What is your view of Phill's technical > arguments with CBOR? Do you agree that CBOR is flawed? PHB's comments were valid. Though I'll point out that a clear applicability statement is one potential way to allow something like this to advance without directly addressing those concerns. I might prefer that those concerns be addressed directly, but I also want a pony. > To the rest of the community: Do you agree with that concern? Do you > think such an analysis and selection of common goals, leading to one > (or perhaps two) new binary encodings being proposed is what we should > be doing? Or is it acceptable to have work such as CBOR proposed > without that analysis? I'm not 100% convinced either way in this case. I can see the potential here for damage in either direction: choose one format and it might not be applicable in a wide array of valid use cases; or allow multiple, narrowly-focused formats and end up with no consistency at all. (CBOR attempts to cover several branches of the latter case, by defining a narrowly-focused, but somewhat general-purpose mechanism that can be arbitrarily extended.) I'm also highly cynical regarding the ability of a working group to produce anything that avoids these sorts of problems. I'm so glad that I'm not an area director.