CSA Preface 

Standards development within the Information Technology sector is harmonized with international standards development. Through the CSA Technical Committee on Information Technology (TCIT), Canadians serve as the SCC Mirror Committee (SMC) on ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 on Information Technology (ISO/IEC JTC1) for the Standards Council of Canada (SCC), the ISO member body for Canada and sponsor of the Canadian National Committee of the IEC. For brevity, this Standard will be referred to as "CSA ISO/IEC 8825-4" throughout. This Standard supersedes CAN/CSA-ISO/IEC 8825-4:16 (adopted ISO/IEC 8825-4:2015). The International Standard was reviewed by the CSA TCIT under the jurisdiction of the CSA Strategic Steering Committee on Information and Communications Technology and deemed acceptable for use in Canada. This Standard has been formally approved, without modification, by the Technical Committee and has been developed in compliance with Standards Council of Canada requirements for National Standards of Canada. It has been published as a National Standard of Canada by CSA Group. 

Scope 

This Recommendation | International Standard specifies a set of basic XML Encoding Rules (BASIC-XER) that may be used to derive a transfer syntax for values of types defined in Rec. ITU-T X.680 | ISO/IEC 8824-1 and Rec. ITU-T X.681 | ISO/IEC 8824-2. This Recommendation | International Standard also specifies a set of Canonical XML Encoding Rules (CXER) which provide constraints on the basic XML Encoding Rules and produce a unique encoding for any given ASN.1 value. This Recommendation | International Standard further specifies a set of extended XML Encoding Rules (EXTENDED-XER) which adds further encoders options, and also allows the ASN.1 specifier to vary the encoding that would be produced by BASIC-XER. It is implicit in the specification of these encoding rules that they are also used for decoding. 

The encoding rules specified in this Recommendation | International Standard:

- are used at the time of communication; 

- are intended for use in circumstances where displaying of values and/or processing them using commonly available XML tools (such as browsers) is the major concern in the choice of encoding rules; 

- allow the extension of an abstract syntax by addition of extra values for all forms of extensibility described in Rec. ITU-T X.680 | ISO/IEC 8824-1. 

This Recommendation | International Standard also specifies the syntax and semantics of XER encoding instructions, and the rules for their assignment and combination. XER encoding instructions can be used to control the EXTENDEDXER encoding for specific ASN.1 types.