On May 4, 2009, at 6:04 PM, Daniel A. Nagy wrote:
Also, since mobile phones typically have a numeric keypad, it would
be nice if
fingerprints and key IDs were numeric-only. It is an increasingly
important
platform for OpenPGP, I believe.
I think that is a good point and a great idea, but the only reason
that fingerprints and key IDs are printed in hex now is tradition.
There is nothing in the standard one way or another about how humans
should consume fingerprints. You could even do it with the current V4
fingerprints: just as my key fingerprint is
7D92FD313AB6F3734CC59CA1DB698D7199242560 in hex, it is equally correct
as 716901811312187285520504099705403090347495794016 in decimal. The
big problem I see here is that's it's an awfully long number to type
into a mobile keypad. (Well, that, and persuading the various
implementations to support the decimal format in addition to the
traditional hex).
David