Comment by zzo38computer

> This refers to CBOR's indefinite length types, but awkwardly, streaming is a protocol level feature, not a data format level feature.

BER also has indefinite length as well as definite length, but the way that it is doing, is not very good (DER only uses definite length). I think it is more helpful to use a different format when streaming with indefinite length is require, so I made up DSER (and SDSER) which is working as follows:

- The type, which is encoded same as DER.

- If it is constructed, all items it contains come next (the length is omitted).

- If it is primitive, zero or more segments, each of which starts with one byte in range 0x01 to 0xFF telling how many bytes of data are in that segment. (The value is then just the concatenation of all segments together.)

- For both primitive and constructed, one byte with value 0x00 is the termination code.

> Bormann's contribution is the registry, which is bonkers [1]. There's... dozens of extensions there? Hundreds? No CBOR implementation supports anywhere near all this stuff.

It should not need to support all of that stuff; you will only use the ones that are relevant for your program. (There is also the similar kind of complaint with ASN.1, and the similar response that I had made.)

> If something is in high demand, but doesn't have good support across platforms, then you're putting extra burden on those platforms. Ex: it's not great if my tiny microcontroller now has to support bignums or 128-bit UUIDs.

Although it is a valid concern, you would use data which does not have numbers bigger than you need to be, so it can avoid such a problem. You can treat UUIDs like octet strings, although if you only need small numbers then you should use the small numbers types instead, anyways.

> If something isn't in high demand or can't easily be supported across platforms, but you want support for it anyway, there's no need to tell anyone else you're using that thing.

Sometimes it is useful to tell someone else that you are using that thing, although often it is unnecessary, like you said.