[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: Display types?
[ I'm taking this discussion back onto the list, I hope that's ok ]
Paul Leach <paulle@microsoft.com> writes:
> You can use any charset you like with your friends -- it just won't
> interoperate with others. The MUST in _standards_ is for when you are
> interoperating with "non-local" people with whom you _don't_ have a private
> agreement.
Sorry, but you're missing my point. Say I use iso-8859-1 for my local
spki use. *If* I can use a display-type, or some other mechanism to
tell the spki software that I'm using latin1, everything is fine.
However, what is being discussed here is *removing* that very
mechanism.
Say that for my local use I have some standard spki object with my
name, "Niels Möller", in one of its name fields, without any
display-type to tell the software that I'm using latin1. Now, "Möller"
is not a valid UTF-8 string. That means that *any* complying
SPKI-aware software I'm using will reject the object. (If the string
happened to also be valid UTF-8, it would be misinterpreted, which
wouldn't be much better).
So for this "local use" of mine, I will have to write my own software,
and even worse, there's no way to make that software of mine comply
with the spki standard. Summary: Any use of local charsets in spki
objects is by definition *impossible*, because there's no way to
support anything but UTF-8 without breaking the spki standard.
Standards and interoperability is not only about sending data across
the internet, it is also about different implementations
interoperating locally.
Do you understand my problem? If UTF-8 is the recommended encoding for
most non-local uses of spki, that's just fine with me. What bothers me
is the removal of the *possibility* to support local char sets in a
clean way.
/Niels