RFC 7049, "Concise Binary Object Representation (CBOR)", October 2013

Note: This RFC has been obsoleted by RFC 8949

Errata ID: 4409
Status: Rejected
Type: Technical
Publication Format(s) : TEXT
Reported By: Jim Schaad
Date Reported: 2015-07-06
Rejected by: Barry Leiba
Date Rejected: 2020-07-17

Section 3.9 says:

  The sorting rules are:

      *  If two keys have different lengths, the shorter one sorts
         earlier;

      *  If two keys have the same length, the one with the lower value
         in (byte-wise) lexical order sorts earlier.

It should say:

  The sorting rules are:

      *  If the major types are different, the one with the lower value
          in numerical order sorts earlier.

      *  If two keys have different lengths, the shorter one sorts
         earlier;

      *  If two keys have the same length, the one with the lower value
         in (byte-wise) lexical order sorts earlier.

Notes:

As the rules are currently written, The integer -257 would be sorted after the integer 16 because has a length of 2 rather than a length of 1. First rule says shorter keys sort first. However the text above says the sorting is based on the byte representation of the key.
--VERIFIER NOTES--
This report has been rejected because this is a change in documented behavior
that would require working groupconsensus. That said, this was taken into account
by the working group during the production of the updated version of RFC 7049.

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