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Re: [ietf-dkim] SSP - should we drop the cryptic o=. syntax for something a little more readable?

2006-02-17 08:56:04
Eric Allman wrote:
Oh goody, I get to be a contrarian!

-1


Mike, I would have been severely disappointed if you weren't a contrarian.

For two reasons:

1) With my developers hat on, I couldn't really care the least:
    if you have to look them up, you probably need to look up the
    other single character tags too. This is just a matter of being
    familiar with the spec, and h, z, b, m etc are all equally
    opaque IMO.


Good point, but I still find (most of) the letters to be more mnemonic than characters such as "-", "~", and "!", all of which mean "not" to me.

Not to belabor this too much, but even in my example above, I got
m(ethod) wrong for q(uery)...


2) I'm guessing that we will utterly fail to have a single word that
    describes the rich semeantics of the policy attached to whatever
    symbol we choose. Witness this latest brouhaha with "exclusive"
    which is not even part of the current draft. An abstract symbol
    which has no baggage of its own and is, in fact, just a pointer
    to the normative text seems like a better way to avoid
    misinterpretation.


I have to admit that this is a good point.

One other thing I wanted to mention: at this point I'm a lot more
concerned about the semantics than the syntax. That is, we've never
even really come to any consensus that the current crop of policies
are actually the right ones, and I'm generally concerned that we
need to understand how what is currently described as the "testing"
axis relates to the current "policy" axis... and whether those two
axes needed, sufficient and/or correct.

                Mike
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