Talk:X.690

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This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later.

Definite, Long Form Example Discrepancy[edit]

There seem to be some discrepancies between the bit values and the supposed content length in the example for the Definite Length Long Form.

First, the title says "Long form example, length 435", but the table shows "450 content octets".

Second, if you add up the two bytes they seem to add up to much less. I count 180 (largest bit on left of octet) or 333 (largest bit on right of octet).

Can anyone explain this discrepancy or am I just doing something wrong? 198.24.6.220 (talk) 16:42, 14 March 2016 (UTC)Joseph Glover[reply]

I've figured out my mistake, I am now getting 435.

Should 450 be corrected to 435?

Thanks,

198.24.6.220 (talk) 16:48, 14 March 2016 (UTC)Joseph Glover[reply]

Confusing/Circular Uses of Terminology[edit]

This may be more of a complaint about X.690 itself, but this article could probably be improved too. There is a lot of interchange in critical terminology, for example: identifier/type/tag/class/number and element/field/content/value/data. Besides the confusion caused by multiple terms for the same thing, the terms are sometimes used to specifically refer to parts of the whole, and then sometimes the whole. For example, tag represents a data type, but tag is a component of the identifier, and type is a kind of tag. (It makes my head spin.) For example, here's a sentence from the article, with emphasis added by me:

The tag used in the identifier octets is the tag of the chosen type, as specified in the ASN.1 definition of the chosen type.

I may try to edit the article for clarity, but since I'm not an expert on X.690, I will probably be too cautious. (I hope an expert is reading this and can take over.) Still, I may make mistakes, so please understand. I'd appreciate any advice.
--Cmjanicki (talk) 16:11, 7 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

General purpose encyclopedia[edit]

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, for general reading. Any article should be written so as to provide a general overview of a topic, with succinctness as the primary test, not completeness.

I would not criticise an article for being complete, as long as it were succinct.

In this case though, the article lacks much information pertinent to a general reading audience, instead the contributors and perhaps readers have abused Wikipedia for their own narrow use as a technical manual. Wikipedia is not your technical manual.

The article lacks at least the following important informations, which hopefully can be easily and succinctly provided, perhaps at the top of the article before you get bogged down in the representation of the actual protocols in discussion:

history. What is the history of X.690?
Who provides X.690
Why? Not just what is X.690 for, but why have the providers of X.690 provided it?
Licensing, patents, specifying authorities etc.
Implementors, what or who are some key or major implementors of X.690?

etc

(I made some small changes to the article, please do not infer that I tried to fix anything mentioned here. I do not know anything about X.690, and am too tired to read about it from the source documents, and even if I did, no-one is paying me to fix this crud.) You would think an internet publication could get this stuff right. [WIKIPEDIA SHALL REFRAIN FROM PUBLICATION OF IP]