Subject: [Cbor] Protocol Action: 'Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) Tags for Typed Arrays' to Proposed Standard (draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-08.txt)

From: The IESG <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 21 Oct 2019 10:31:29 -0700

The IESG has approved the following document:
- 'Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) Tags for Typed Arrays'
  (draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags-08.txt) as Proposed Standard

This document is the product of the Concise Binary Object Representation
Maintenance and Extensions Working Group.

The IESG contact persons are Adam Roach, Alexey Melnikov and Barry Leiba.

A URL of this Internet Draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-cbor-array-tags/

Technical Summary

  The Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR, RFC 7049) is a data
  format whose design goals include the possibility of extremely small
  code size, fairly small message size, and extensibility without the
  need for version negotiation.

  The present document makes use of this extensibility to define a
  number of CBOR tags for typed arrays of numeric data, as well as two
  additional tags for multi-dimensional and homogeneous arrays.  It is
  intended as the reference document for the IANA registration of the
  CBOR tags defined.

Working Group Summary

  There were two point that could be considered as a controversy.
  The first if there should be a rule about using big endian or little 
  endian in the case of deterministic encoding. The WG consensus result
  was no, but that may not reflect the view of all individuals in the 
  working group.
  Secondly, regarding tag 68 (Uint8ClampedArray):
  on one side, it was noted that such a tag indicates a property of the
  processing more than just the item's encoding. On the other side, it was 
  noted that that allows to identify more precisely what the data type
  is, which is a desirable feature of CBOR, and that this does not 
  differ from other tags such as MIME. In general, this brings up the 
  point of using CBOR tags to identify types of objects in protocols 
  that exists elsewhere in an object oriented system, such as in other
  standards or other implementations (JavaScript/ES6 for 
  “Uint8ClampedArray”) rather than in JSON. The WG consensus was 
  towards this being a desirable feature, and the tag was kept in the
  document.

  Another more general note, there exist different perception of 
  usefulness of some of the concepts in the document (such as homogenous
  arrays).

Document Quality

  There is no existing implementations of the specifications, as far as
  I can tell. The document went through several thorough reviews during
  the time as working group document, including broader community
  reviews. No expert review was requested, although an expert review was
  done during early registration of IANA parameters defined in this 
  document.

Personnel

  Francesca Palombini is the Document Shepherd.
  Alexey Melnikov is the Responsible Area Director.