Subject: Format of error text

From: "Christopher Williams" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 17:53:30 +0100

The specification states:

"-- text encoded as UTF-8 String [RFC2279] (note:  each UTF8String 
  -- SHOULD include an RFC 1766 language tag to indicate the 
  -- language of the contained text -- see [RFC2482] for details)"

Does this mean something like the following:

"<en-uk> Unexpected PKI message"?

Christopher Williams

Software engineer, NetLexis Ltd.
Solutions for secure electronic commerce
http://www.netlexis.com

---

From: Paul Hoffman / IMC <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2000 13:40:53 -0700

>"<en-uk> Unexpected PKI message"?

The actual octets in the UTF-8 string would be:

f3a081a5 f3a081ae f3a080ad f3a081b5 f3a081ab 
556e6578   ....................Unex
70656374 65642050 4b49206d 65737361 6765                pected PKI message

Having said this, I think that the SHOULD in the above section is probably 
overstated. I say this as someone who previously lobbied for language 
tagging. The general feeling about language tags these days is that they 
are only needed for machine processing, such as text-to-speech synthesizers 
and spelling checkers. It might be good if draft-ietf-pkix-rfc2510bis 
changed this from a SHOULD to a MAY.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium