From owner-spki@c2.net Mon Mar 15 18:21:07 1999 Received: from blacklodge.c2.net (blacklodge.c2.net [140.174.185.245]) by lox.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca (8.8.7/8.8.8) with ESMTP id SAA10823; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 18:21:06 -0500 (EST) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by blacklodge.c2.net (8.8.8/8.7.3) id OAA19725 for spki-outgoing; Mon, 15 Mar 1999 14:39:41 -0800 (PST) To: Ron Rivest Cc: rgrimm@cs.washington.edu, spki@c2.net Subject: Re: Display types? References: <199903151518.KAA16272@swan.lcs.mit.edu> From: Paul Crowley Date: 15 Mar 1999 19:10:46 +0000 In-Reply-To: Ron Rivest's message of "Mon, 15 Mar 1999 10:18:38 -0500 (EST)" Message-ID: <87g17636x5.fsf@hedonism.demon.co.uk> Lines: 28 X-Mailer: Gnus v5.5/XEmacs 20.4 - "Emerald" Sender: owner-spki@c2.net Precedence: bulk Ron Rivest writes: > I agree with you both the display types are a debatable feature of > SPKI/SDSI. They obviously add a little bit of complexity. On the > other hand, they have the following benefits: > > (1) they allow the use of names over a non-Latin alphabet > > (2) they allow incorporation of pictures and other document > types I think these advantages are both important features of SPKI/SDSI, but as far as I can tell they can be done without the complexity of display types, by adding an entry in the BNF definition for typed data : | : "(" "mime" ")" or something like this. This seems a better fit to the problem, since a MIME type would be inappropriate to most of the strings in SPKI/SDSI constructions. Also, it can better be extended to handle some of the subleties of real MIME data. -- __ \/ o\ paul@hedonism.demon.co.uk http://www.hedonism.demon.co.uk/paul/ \ / /\__/ Paul Crowley Upgrade your legacy NT machines to Linux /~\