| I can understand your frustration. However, the unstructuring of data and keeping a single form of communication is what has kept UNIX around for so long and why Linux hasn't collapsed under its own weight long ago. I was voicing your opinions exactly when I was new to the professional computing world. Over time I saw a lot of structured data schemes come and go and they all fall down with this: inflexibility and improper implementations. Where do you think does the structure inside the data come from? You need to come up with a standard. Now you need everyone to stick to that standard. You need to parse the entire data or at least most of it to get to the information you need, finding new security footguns on the way. Soon you will realise you need to extend the standard. Now you have not only conflicting implementations (because noone ever gets them completely right) but conflicting versions. And this needs to be done for every single fucking little filter and every single language they are written in. Take a look at the various implementations of DER and ASN.1. The standard seems simple at first glance, but I haven't seen a single implementation that wasn't wrong, incomplete or buggy. Most of them are all of that. And DER is a very old standard that people should have understood in the meantime. In order to get at least a bit of sanity in all of this, you need a central source of The Truth wrt. your standard. Who is that going to be for Linux and the BSDs and for macOS? Linus? Microsoft? Apple? The ISO standards board? You? And all of this is equally true for log data. I'm okay with tossing backwards compatibility over board. But not in favour of the horrible nightmare some people here seem to propose. |