Jim:
I believe that this is useful independent of where tools draw the line.
This is an advantage of putting more data into a single location for people
to read rather than having to go through the entire document for the same
data.
I've been thinking about this, and I agree. It really would help
implementors to link all of this information together with
unambiguous ASN.1, but it does lead to a compatibility problem. We
would no longer be using the same definitions as X.509. The new ones
would include this additional information to aid implementors, and
generate exactly the same bits on the wire. I'm not sure the
incompatibility is worth it.
Implementors need to speak up here? The structures proposed by Jim
would replace tables (or some other structure chosen by the
implementor). Are implementors going to embrace the approach offered by Jim?
Russ