Re: Armour

[Dave Crocker / IMC <dcrocker@xxxxxxx>]

At 01:29 PM 11/15/97 -0800, John  W. Noerenberg wrote:
>>I'm not arguing that we should totally do away with armour - just that I
>>don't think it should be a MUST, so that people who want to use OpenPGP
...
>This is probably closest to my own point of view, Ian.  The ability to
>generate and accept ascii armor must be preserved for backwards
>compatibility.  However, successfully encoding and decoding a message
>should not mandate translation through ascii armor.

Let me suggest that the cleanest way to handle this is by including its
specification in an appendix, with a note explaining that is has been used
in the past and that the capabilities defined in the appendix are needed
for processing data from these earlier (pre-standards) systems.  

This puts the old armouring mechanism outside of the formal standard but
keeps people informed about its existance and details, and the reason it
might be useful.

d/ 
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Dave Crocker                                          dcrocker@xxxxxxx
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