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/