On Tue, 2 Jan 1996, Stephen Kent wrote:
Donald,
From the timestamp on your message it seems you were up pretty late
writing that diatribe. Ypu MAY find that more sleep will result in a
better disposition, no guarantees implied or expressed ;-)!
I think you are right there. That message to you and one other message I
sent a couple of weeks ago in a completely different context cuased me to
put a sign on my terminal saying "smile". I'll try for a lighter tone.
(I always thought of "diatribe"s as long. My message was pretty short.
perhaps "flame" would be more descriptive.)
Some of my good friends are lawyers, so I'll interpret your
comments in that spirit. As co-chair of this WG I'll try to respond to
message in an even handed fashion, while not completely giving up my own
views on what might be a preferred approach to addressing the problems that
we face. My wording is often carefully chosen, precisely to avoid sounding
too authoritative and possibly stiffling discussion. As you infered from
the tone of my response, I am disposed to using ASN.1 syntax and encoding
for the messages in question, unless there are good reasons to adopt other
syntax and encoding conventions.
I think I would have viewed your message differently if I had known you
were the WG chair. Ignorance os this is my fault. On the other hand,
some WG chairs label messages (or even parts of messages) as to whether
they are speaking as the chair or just speaking their mind
as a WG member. You might find this useful.
The more I learn of the PKIX effort the more I begin to think that using
ASN.1 would be a great idea, the better to assure that the effort sinks
under its weight.
Thanks for sparing us your (too) long discussion of what's wrong
with ASN.1, DNs, and anything else that ISO had a hand in.
Sure. Actually, most of ISO is OK, it's just that they usually have problems
in the networking area when evaluated by IETF criteria.
Finally, the charter of this WG specifies the use of X.509
certificates and so you MAY be right to focus your efforts elsewhere, gievn
your feelings.
Steve
Donald
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