> However, you're abusing a text format for human reading and pretending it's a serialization format.
They should be the same, in order to facilitate human debugging. And we were discussing ASN.1, not its serialisations. Frankly, I thought that it was fairer to compare the S-expression to ASN.1, because both are human-readable, rather than to an opaque blob like:
Sure, that blob is far more space-efficient, but it’s also completely opaque without tooling. Think how many XPKI errors over the years have been due to folks being unable to know at a glance what certificates and keys actually say.
No worries! ASN.1 is a bit weird because there’s a textual version and then a bunch of serialisations.
I think that human-readable is more important than space-efficient. At some point an engineer is going to be looking at bytes in a dump or debugger, and it sure is nice to be able to quickly know what they are.
They should be the same, in order to facilitate human debugging. And we were discussing ASN.1, not its serialisations. Frankly, I thought that it was fairer to compare the S-expression to ASN.1, because both are human-readable, rather than to an opaque blob like:
Sure, that blob is far more space-efficient, but it’s also completely opaque without tooling. Think how many XPKI errors over the years have been due to folks being unable to know at a glance what certificates and keys actually say.