meh... just another of those "quirks" things to note in the protocol, i'm not gonna waste my time on it
searching for issues brought up some stuff about forming those canonical formatted array form of the events and reminded me that some programming languages JSON implementations have to be worked around in order to do this properly (notably python)
json is such a poorly specified format to be deriving event IDs from
i for one look forward to the day when we do it with protobuf
I’d rather see us have an upgrade path to CBOR, personally.
my point is it doesn't matter which way it's done, the event has to be rewritten to get a canonical hash on it
it's just a matter of a client and relay implementing it, and adding some kind of bit in the nip-11 that discloses the encoder types used
now that's a useful contribution to make, gonna drop that on the issues
actually, no, meh, there isn't really any reason to do it
encoding the content field is the main irritation in the json canonical format
i think all the implementations of it are now correct, anyway, but i doubt there is any real advantage to switching over to another encoding without the additional justification of switching to QUIC which lets the queues run a bit smoother at high load
it only amounts to like 48 bytes of extra utilisation plus maybe similar amount again due to json string escaping, really it doesn't add up to much... removing the ID from the event would do more, since it has to be reformatted to get the ID to verify it, might as well just not send the ID
If you made no other changes, then yes, encoding with a binary format like CBOR makes little difference and wouldn’t be worth it.
Where it makes sense is if you also allow native binary packets. That is, make the id, author, content and signature fields raw bytes. Keep tags as strings.
A common tag might be “mime-type”. Additional compression optional.
This would open the door for using Nostr to relay non-text data without paying the base64 or URL encoding cost to cram binary data into the content string. Additional data structures can themselves be nested CBOR binary content etc.
