As I stated many times, I think binary encoding is superior to text based encoding. However, usually, when you are a software engineer implementing a protocol, the protocol choice is not yours. In this post, I will consider the pitfalls and gotcha’s of text-based protocols and how to design your way around them. I mostly consider protocols defined by ABNF rules (such as SIP). If the protocol uses an XML scheme, there are readily available documents on parsing XML into
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By Ran Arad | July 3rd, 2008 | Filed under Development, SDKs
Joel Spolsky wrote a brilliant post 3 days ago about Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 development team declaring that IE8 will enforce standard HTML, and sites that do not confirm to the standards will not be displayed properly. Joel did not wish to take sides in the war between idealists and pragmatists, but eventually concluded that since there are so many HTML pages already written in bad HTML, the pragmatists are likely to win. That means that any web site not
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By Ran Arad | March 20th, 2008 | Filed under Interoperability, Standardization
If there is one thing I learned, it’s that text based encodings are a menace. They have their use, have no doubt; I’m not throwing away all the XML flavors and HTTP-like protocols. I’m just saying that their use should be limited to cases where we already deal with text-based data, like HTML or information repositories, not for complex communication protocols. Binary Decoders Two things can be said about binary decoding: it’s rigid and it’s repetitive. That means that if
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By Ran Arad | February 11th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
