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RE: Display types?
Niels,
fixing UTF-8 as an encoding for the canonical form would simply force you to
use that encoding for authorization computations, but your application is
still free to use whatever encoding it pleases internally. You already have
to convert to the canonical form anyway for authorization computations, so
fixing UTF-8 does not seem like an unreasonable constraint.
Furthermore, I would argue that switching to UTF-8 as the only encoding for
text actually eliminates ambiguity. Currently, a name could be encoded in
any encoding, so if the display hint got ignored a name might be
misdisplayed on some systems.
Robert
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nisse@lysator.liu.se [mailto:nisse@lysator.liu.se]
> Sent: Monday, March 15, 1999 5:45 PM
> To: Eric Grosse
> Cc: Ron Rivest; rgrimm@cs.washington.edu; paul@hedonism.demon.co.uk;
> spki@c2.net
> Subject: Re: Display types?
>
>
> Eric Grosse <ehg@research.bell-labs.com> writes:
>
> > Ron Rivest wrote:
> > > (1) [Display types] allow the use of names over a
> non-Latin alphabet
> > > My personal opinion is that (1) makes them worth the
> extra trouble...
> >
> > Can we drop display types and declare that the name is
> UTF8? That gets us
> > both an international alphabet and a simple syntax.
>
> I _strongly_ dislike that idea. Using a display type or similar say
> that a particular string is in UTF8 is just fine.
>
> But making it the default, and at the same time *remove* the option to
> use anything else, that is plain evil. UTF8 is reasonable as a
> _transport_ encoding, but wherever you have a system or application
> that uses some suitable local 8-bit character set (like I do
> currently) _or_ 16-bit characters (like I hope to be doing in the not
> too distant future), dealing with UTF8 is a pain.
>
> Again, UTF8 is useful as a transport encoding for global use (whenever
> a wide-char communication is unavailable). But I want to be able to
> use sexp and spki also for local stuff, and I definitely do *not* want
> that to require use of UTF8.
>
> Please, don't do that.
>
> Regards,
> /Niels Möller
>