ietf-openpgp
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Re: Forbidding 8bit text in Armor comments

2001-07-30 22:28:57

On 2001-07-30 17:38:48 -0700, Jon Callas wrote:

However, the comment line is precisely that -- it's a comment for people, not for the machines.

Embedded in data which should normally never be presented to people in that form. A very useful concept, indeed.

In practice, it's a bumper-sticker field that people use to advertise their favorite implementation or the slogan of the week. If it gets mangled by a transport, it doesn't cause the protocol any problems. The ASCII armor still transfers the secure object.

True. But still, with e-mail transfer, an utf-8 comment header would make it necessary to MIME-encode ASCII armor, which sounds extremely ugly, and would possibly kind of break PGP/MIME's tradition (ever since RFC 2015) of using ASCII armor _instead_ _of_ MIME encodings.

--
Thomas Roessler                        http://log.does-not-exist.org/