I don't know if we came to any conclusion as to whether we wanted to
support skippable things at this level of the spec, but if so, we should
assign a bit of that length as a "skippable" flag and decide how to use
it: what metadata to (write ...) would be used to decide what elements
are skippable if the reader doesn't understand their type?
I don't think you can, because in any kind of open-loop system such as a pipeline, as opposed to traditional RPC, the sender has no idea what the recipient cares about. It's quite typical, for example, when you receive a UBL <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Business_Language> document, to cherry-pick whatever data you want to out of it and leave the rest alone. I thought there was a paper about this called "'Must Understand' Considered Harmful", but I can't find it now.
John Cowan
http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan xxxxxx@ccil.org"Your honour puts yourself to much trouble correcting my English and
doubtless the final letter will be much better literature; but it will
go from me Mukherji to him Bannerji, and he Bannerji will understand it a
great deal better as I Mukherji write it than as your honour corrects it."
--19th-century Indian civil servant to his British superior