Subject: Re: Notation data language

From: David Shaw <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 14:26:21 -0500

On Wed, Dec 05, 2001 at 10:44:46AM -0800, [email-masked] wrote:
> Maybe the best thing would be if you could tell us more about how you
> are planning to use notation data.  This is not a feature which is
> currently used in PGP, it is intended for support of new applications.
> It's always difficult to specify a feature when you don't know how it
> will be used.  Usually in IETF we try to do things the other way around.
> But this was intended as an escape clause for future expansion, so we
> had to specify it without any practical experience to guide us.

Understood.  Unfortunately, I'm not sure we're really communicating.
I'm not creating any notations.  However, I am writing code that can
display notations.

The question can be boiled down to whether the "name" of the
name=value pair is always human readable.  "Human readable", to me,
meaning that it is made up of characters that can be displayed in some
more or less readable way (i.e. printable characters).  As I said, the
draft seems to say that this is the case.  If it isn't the case,
that's fine too.  I'm just trying to clarify the point.

For what it's worth, although none have been officially described by
the IETF, some notations are being used.  On my keyring at the moment
exist a few notations names like "Certification" and "COMMENT" (and a
handful of "foo", of course).

David

-- 
David Shaw          |  Technical Lead
<[email-masked]>  |  Enterprise Content Delivery
617-250-3028        |  Akamai Technologies

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 10:44:46 -0800

Hal