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Re: Thoughts on the draft
I would like to remind you that 90% of the people in the world live in
countries where you *need* 8, 16 or 32 bit characters and national
character sets. Please do not cast a 7-bit ASCII curse on us again.
It is not a good idea to assume that ASCII would make anything
readable. Names will anyway need something like ISO-2022 in many
cases. If names aren't cleanly printable anyway, how much do you gain
by being strictly ascii? You introduce lots of nasty quotation issues
if you go for pure 7-bit ASCII.
Tatu
> >There appear to be two camps forming on this topic. If we support both,
> >then there would be two forms of certificate which wouldn't interoperate.
> >The issue is which form is the source byte stream for the certificate's
> >signature. If there are native ASCII certs, then the ASCII is the source
> >(ala SDSI). If the binary is native, then the binary is the source.
> >
> >I've met people who want to work in nothing but ASCII. I've met others who
> >want to work in nothing but binary.
> >
> >Opinions on how to proceed?
>
> I think it would be a mistake to allow both forms. There needs to be a
> cannonical form for signatures. For example, an EBCDIC computer would need
> to translate an EBCDIC certificate to ASCII before signing it. For ASCII,
> we need to specify the parity bit (as zero).
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