At 01:29 PM 11/15/97 -0800, John W. Noerenberg wrote:
I'm not arguing that we should totally do away with armour - just that I
don't think it should be a MUST, so that people who want to use OpenPGP
...
This is probably closest to my own point of view, Ian. The ability to
generate and accept ascii armor must be preserved for backwards
compatibility. However, successfully encoding and decoding a message
should not mandate translation through ascii armor.
Let me suggest that the cleanest way to handle this is by including its
specification in an appendix, with a note explaining that is has been used
in the past and that the capabilities defined in the appendix are needed
for processing data from these earlier (pre-standards) systems.
This puts the old armouring mechanism outside of the formal standard but
keeps people informed about its existance and details, and the reason it
might be useful.
d/
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Dave Crocker
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