Regarding the location of the preferred email format notation packet, I
should have made it clear that this is a subpacket in the self-signature
on the userid.
As far as human-readability, it's true that it might be more convenient
in terms of compatibility with existing code to use an array of numeric
values. But human readability has some advantages, too. It allows
notation packets to be displayed to users even when the software doesn't
understand what they mean. Utilities like pgpdump and gnupg's built-in
dumper can probably already display this notation packet. It doesn't
help all that much for what we are doing in this particular case but it
does add to the transparency and understandability of the overall system.
Going forward I suggest that it would be better to have notation packets
generally be human readable where possible.
Hal Finney