Subject: Re: Favored Base32 Alphabet?

From: Simon Josefsson <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 20:02:21 +0100

"Gordon Mohr" <[email-masked]> writes:

> There are multiple Base32 alphabets floating about
> in Internet-Drafts. For example,
...

This discussion contained some good points, I hope the updates version
of this document includes them.  In particular, I've added a "URL and
Filename safe" base64 alphabet, which seem to be used in certain
places.  Comments welcome, my hope is to send this off to the IESG
secretariat, to request RFC publication, before the end of the year
(unless I hear something regarding the not-yet-formed SASL WG, which
have expressed interest).

http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-josefsson-base-encoding-03.txt

---

From: "Gordon Mohr" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 16:24:12 -0800

Thanks for the update, Simon -- it's a useful collection/naming of
the alphabets in use.

However, I notice that you haven't listed a Base32 alphabet that
was proposed in a number of the internationalized-domain-name (IDN)
ascii-compatible-encoding (ACE) drafts. This alphabet is the 
"Canonical" alphabet, without the letters 'L' and 'O' -- thus 
reaching '8' and '9' at the end.

Though not adopted by the IDN efforts, this alphabet struck me
as the most sensible choice for identifiers which might be
human transcibed, in whole or in fragments, and so my company
is using it in our current system. 

There's still time for us to change without too much pain, and 
I'm more interested in global convergence on a preferred 
alphabet, than any tiny advantages one or the other has.

So, what I'd really like is a clear statement in your draft 
that a particular alphabet is "preferred" for future protocol 
work, and that "Base32", when used alone, should be presumed
to mean a particular alphabet. Terming one alphabet the
"Canonical" alphabet almost does the trick; an explicit statement
that IETF documents are presumed to use this alphabet would
be even better.

One other comment: Since people often search for "Base32" and
"Base64" (no spaces), it would be helpful for these tokens
to appear in the draft/RFC text as well, to make sure it comes up
in search results.

- Gordon
____________________
Gordon Mohr, gojomo@
bitzi.com, Bitzi CTO
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