ICS-4: Acknowledgement Envelope is misleading

[plafer]

The section states:

The field numbers 21 and 22 were explicitly chosen to avoid accidental conflicts with other protobuf message formats used for acknowledgements. The first byte of any message with this format will be the non-ASCII values 0xaa (result) or 0xb2 (error).

This suggests that the protobuf encoding of this message is used. However, in ICS-20 and ICS-721,

Note that both the FungibleTokenPacketData as well as FungibleTokenPacketAcknowledgement must be JSON-encoded (not Protobuf encoded) when they serialized into packet data.

suggesting that apps don't even use that Acknowledgement Envelope as described in ICS-4.

In my opinion, it would be less confusing if we

1. removed that section from ICS-4, and
2. have apps specify their Acknowledgement format in JSON directly.

Note that as stated, the ICS-20/721 statement is incomplete. "JSON-encoded" doesn't imply "encode byte arrays with base64"; this is a by-product of the JSON-encoding proto3 spec (which took me some time to figure out). It is also implied that the JSON must have all spaces removed (implicitly done by MustSortJSON()). Specifying the format in JSON directly would remove any sort of confusion.

[colin-axner]

Great suggestion. Only caveat I would add is if the spec continues to allow any encoding format to be used for acknowledgements/packet data, it might still be worth keeping that section on proto encoding, but making it more explicit that standard encoding use has been JSON and not proto

I will open an issue for adding encoding format's of packet data as well