1. Summary
This document proposes a standard notational convention to express CBOR
data structures. 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. As it's proposing a standard, its target status is
Proposed Standard.
Barry Leiba is the document shepherd and Alexey Melnikov is the
responsible AD.
2. Review and Consensus
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.
3. Intellectual Property
The authors are in full compliance with BCPs 78 and 79 and there is no
known IPR directly related to this document.
4. Other Points
There is a normative reference to an ISO document, ISO 6093.
The document creates a new IANA registry that uses "specification
required", and the instructions to IANA and to the designated expert are
clear and sufficient. An expert will need to be designated for this
registry. It would be appropriate to use the same expert(s) as for the
CBOR Simple Values and CBOR Tags registries (currently, Carsten).