Re: iCalendar as an XML DTD

[Chris Newman <Chris.Newman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 20 Apr 1998, Barry Pederson wrote:
> It's too bad the timing of these two developments (iCalendar and XML)
> wasn't a little different.  I'm sure that if XML had come first, and
> someone had said "nah...let's not use that and come up with our own
> similar but incompatible syntax", they'd have been laughed out the door.

If we were to decide to change syntax or introduce an alternate syntax for
political reasons, then ASN.1 DER is obviously the right choice due to its
international acceptance, its successful track record in IETF protocols
(SNMP, LDAP) and the fact that ASN.1 BER/DER parsers already exist in the
vast majority of deployed web browers (in their SSL certificate & LDAP
code) while XML is almost unused by comparison. 

The moral is: If we use politics to determine syntax, then we lose. 
Syntax is a technical problem and changing syntax is almost never a good
idea.

		- Chris

Quote from the ASN.1 Standard: "The resulting type and value of an
instance of use of the new value notation is determined by the value (and
the type of the value) finally assigned to the distinguished local value
reference indentified by the keyword VALUE, according to the processing of
the macrodefinition for the new type notation followed by that for the new
value notation."