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Comments on SPKI draft of 25 March 1997




Some more comments and suggestions:

* Let's dump the ":" from the object names, for compactness.  I think the
  ":"s add a little to the "look and feel" of the printed forms, but not
  that much.  

* Let's agree that object names are CASE-INSENSITIVE.  (This is question
  6 of page 34.)  

* Let's eliminate the display information prefix form (from 4.2.2) e.g.
	[unicode] octet-string
  which is used to indicate how the following octet-string is to be
  displayed, and recode it as an S-expression:
	( display-type unicode octet-string )
  That is:
	-- the object type "display-type" is now reserved.
	-- any object of type "display-type" must have two parameters;
           the first must an octet-string which gives information about how 
           to display the second parameter, which must also be an octet 
           string.
    	-- for all other purposes 
		( display-type unicode octet-string )
           is equivalent to just
		octet-string
	   No processing, other than displaying, should depend upon the
           presence or absence of the display-type.
  This change should improve the storage efficiency of the SPKI proposal,
  since with the [..] .. format every byte string needs an additional
  pointer (which is usually null) to point to the display type.

Ron Rivest



              

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