Concise Data Definition Language (CDDL): A Notational Convention to Express Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR) and JSON Data Structures
draft-ietf-cbor-cddl-08
Technical Summary
This document proposes a notational convention to express CBOR data
structures (RFC 7049). Its main goal is to provide an easy and
unambiguous way to express structures for protocol messages and data
formats that use CBOR or JSON.
Working Group Summary
The CBOR working group has been working on the CDDL definition for about
a year, and has had productive, healthy discussion that's led to the
current document. There is quite wide deployment of CBOR and a lot of
interesting in the definition language that's proposed here. As is
typical, we had a core set of maybe half a dozen very active
participants, with quite a few others chiming in occasionally. The
document shepherd thinks the interest and contribution has been robust.
There are no significant disagreements that remain, and there's solid
working group consensus on what's here now. There have been
disagreements about how to represent particular things, but they have
been cleanly resolved and none are important to note here. I'll call out
the latest one, as it's just come up: at the end of working group last
call, Jim Schaad raised an issue on the mailing list about an ambiguity
that affects automated parser generation. After discussion on the
working group telechat, Carsten proposed text that clarifies that syntax
alone may not always be sufficient to understand the meaning of a name,
and that semantics of the name must be understood.
Document Quality
Multiple existing IETF documents are already using CDDL for specifying wire encodings.
There are several implementations of CBOR parsers/generators.
Personnel
Barry Leiba is the document shepherd and
Alexey Melnikov is the responsible AD.