Given the goals of MIME/PEM, do we need to BER encode the
<publickey>?
(The object subjectPublicKeyInfo is imported from the X.500 Directory
from the certificate object. It is currently the best choice for a
general purpose public key encoding.)
Alternatively, might we not mandate a simpler set of encoding rules.
How about PGP's highly successful and usable definition, instead?
I think you answered your own question in the second paragraph.
In any case, even though PGP may have developed an encoding that works
quite well, ASN.1 parsing, whether good or bad, is used by many other
applications. Thus, choosing it allows implementors of PEM to re-use a
widely used syntactic representation.
Jim