-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
From: "David Shaw" <dshaw(_at_)jabberwocky(_dot_)com>
There is no (simple) mechanism to register new tags. There is a
rationale statement for this at the head of the RFC, under "IESG
Note". Basically, the idea is that there can be subtle interactions
with unrestricted extensions of the standard, so this is a way to
force proposed extensions to go through the WG process to get wider
consideration.
The "subtle interactions" comment appears to be aimed at security
(cryptographic) issues. It makes less sense for clearly user-defined
content like notations. As long as the ownership of any given tag
is clear (by using well-defined name spaces), I don't see a problem.
But, this was a sidelight to my main question, which was...
There are no notation tags in the IETF space yet. However, a few
What *is* the IETF name space? What does it look like?
months ago, I pulled together a list of all notations used on keys on
the keyserver net. Perhaps unsurprisingly, nobody used the user name
space. By far the most common notation used (87%) was "COMMENT".
By definition, any tag not in the user name space should be in the
IETF name space. If you say that there are none in this name space
yet, you must know something about the structure of the IETF name
space (to know that the existing tags don't fit). Could you give an
example of a valid name in the IETF space, and/or a reference to a
definition of the IETF space?
It certainly doesn't surprise me that there were no tags in the
user name space. It was only a few months ago that I noted that
GnuPG rejected names with "@" in them. (I suspect it was David
who fixed it. Thanks. :-)
I should also note that the "user" name space is not particularly
usable by ordinary folks. According to the RFC, the owner of
"name(_at_)foo(_dot_)bar" is the owner of "foo.bar". Many users don't own
domain
names; at best, they "own" an e-mail address or login name at an ISP.
Further, most own only one; even if the ISP delegated its space by
e-mail address (as the RFC loosely suggests), each user would have
only one tag. Calling it a "user" name space (rather than a "DNS"
name space) is misleading.
So, it doesn't surprise me that people have used simple, unstructured
tag names, either ignoring conflict or assuming that human
interpretation would be obvious and uncontroversial.
Lastly, does anyone happen to know whether/how PGP8 supports notations?
Thanks again!
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGP Personal Privacy 6.5.3
iQA/AwUBPcRPO1MkvpTT8vCGEQIQ6wCgo35xyTboHTK9wyawpD1xVxGwQ5oAnjh0
yjdusKPuOOIV+/UxwrQ4GQnW
=pzew
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----