At this point I am feeling really over my head on the question of UTF-8
vs OCTECT string, I don't have enough knowledge to put in useful input
on that issue. My general impression however is that I would perfer to
have the type explicit in this case rather than implicit.
Independent of that issue however, I think we should consider doing
either an implicit [0] or explicit [0] tag on the utf8String field.
Thus we would use
ESEPrivacyMark ::= CHOICE {
pString PrintableString (SIZE (1..ub-privacy-mark-length)),
utf8String EXPLICIT [0] OCTET STRING
}
It would also be instructive to look at the issue of the size of the
utf8String field. It was limited to a specific length for the
PrintableString version. Should the utf8String version also be of
limited length?
jim
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Hoffman / IMC [mailto:phoffman(_at_)imc(_dot_)org]
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 1998 11:06 AM
To: ietf-smime(_at_)imc(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: Comment on ESS and Privacy Marks
...
PKIFreeText ::= SEQUENCE {
languageTag PrintableString OPTIONAL, --RFC 1766 language tag
text OCTET STRING --carries a UTF-8 string
} -- the languageTag field may be used to indicate the language
-- of the text contained in the "text" field
...
Therefore, I recommend that we leave ESS as is:
ESSPrivacyMark ::= CHOICE {
pString PrintableString (SIZE (1..ub-privacy-mark-length)),
utf8String OCTET STRING
-- If utf8String is used, the contents must be in UTF-8 [UTF8]
}
Not to stir things up too far, but this begs the question: wouldn't the
following be better?
ESSPrivacyMark ::= CHOICE {
pString PrintableString (SIZE (1..ub-privacy-mark-length)),
betterString PKIFreeText
}
I *like* having a language tag associated with a UTF-8, and this gives
implementors the same option as before but allows them to include a
language
tag.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium