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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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