Subj : Re: Is binkp/d's security model kaputt?
To   : Oli
From : tenser
Date : Thu Sep 23 2021 02:17 am

On 22 Sep 2021 at 11:41a, Oli pondered and said...
 
 Ol> IMHO:
 Ol> 
 Ol> 1.) JSON sucks.

Why do you think so?

 Ol>     (No idea why I pitched the idea to use JSON instead of XML to the
 Ol> CouchDB guys)

Oh, so are you the guy to blame for that? :-)  XML is heavyweight
and ugly; it's only really interesting property is preservation of
whitespace.

 Ol> 2.) It's especially stupid as a format for encoding mails. It sucks for
 Ol> 8-bit text that is not UTF-8. You have to escape everything and/or do
 Ol> charset translation.

This I disagree with; for BBS-style emails it's fine.  It's
ubiquitous, libraries to handle it exist in just about every
language, it's extensible, self-describing, etc.

But I'm open to other ideas: what would you recommend instead?

 Ol> 3.) You cannot transport binary data without encoding it to base64 or
 Ol> something similar first.

That's fair, but BBS networks aren't moving enough traffic to
care.

 Ol> Of course you can encode the header fields in JSON and get the message
 Ol> body as a binary blob via another HTTP request. Maybe just use a
 Ol> variation of JMAP (https://jmap.io/spec-mail.html)?

Possibly.  With Content-Type headers one could also just send
zip files or whatever.

 Ol> I still don't see the appeal in using text based protocols and
 Ol> interchange formats.

Extensibility, debugability, self-describing semantics, ease of
production and consumption, avoiding byte-ordering and fixed-length
limitations; a whole host of things.

But I'm not wedded to the idea.  Hell, if someone wants to define
a serialization using protocol buffers or similar, I'm game.

 Ol> 4.) JSON sucks for config files too.

Actual JSON, yes.  HJSON and JSON5, I disagree.  I wrote a passable
parser for JSON5 in ~100 lines of SML, and it makes a dandy config
file format: http://fat-dragon.org/post/json5/

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A46 2020/08/26 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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