I agree, he's a bit too specific on many fields. For example his 'common fields' of the signets include 'currency' and 'cryptocurrency' that has a list of common cryptocurrencies and their three-letter acronyms.
I guess it's nice that you can advertise a cryptocoin address in your signet, but locking down the format like that makes it really fragile. Why use the awkward binary format for the full signet?
Excuse my language, but wouldn't a XML type extensible human readable format be highly preferable and more future-proof than colon/semi-colon delimited UTF-8 strings? Not saying it literally has to be XML.
I would like to see something better too. I know that these low level protocols are all like this but I think at some point the overhead of something like JSON (the quotes, brackets, etc) would definitely be better than dealing with fixed and variable length fields and a lot of regular expressions especially if you want a lot of implementations created to spread a new protocol.
JSON, binary JSON like MessagePack, XML, Protobufs, Thrift, etc. etc., it seems a bit weird to invent a whole new format. Actually two, because the transfer protocol is separate.
Mail transfer has far less performance requirements than, say, HTTP. Plus, their current format still requires per-string parsing, to separate out e.g. your "gender" from your "gender label", whatever that means.
I guess it's nice that you can advertise a cryptocoin address in your signet, but locking down the format like that makes it really fragile. Why use the awkward binary format for the full signet?
Excuse my language, but wouldn't a XML type extensible human readable format be highly preferable and more future-proof than colon/semi-colon delimited UTF-8 strings? Not saying it literally has to be XML.