Re: Forbidding 8bit text in Armor comments

[Jon Callas <jon@xxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:23 AM +0200 7/30/01, Thomas Roessler wrote:
>On 2001-07-29 18:46:27 -0400, John Kane wrote:
>
>>If you want to ensure that ASCII Armor blocks contain only the
>>basic 95 printable characters, you'll need to put something in
>>section 6.2 which says that the 'data' which is concatenated to
>>form ASCII Armor must itself be pure 0x20-0x7E ASCII. Currently
>>this is not part of the spec.
>
>Precisely.  Jon?

Forgive me for being dense, but I don't completely understand the problem.
The armor portion of ASCII armor completely defines what is there, so that
they pass through some potentially damaging transport.

However, the comment line is precisely that -- it's a comment for people,
not for the machines. In practice, it's a bumper-sticker field that people
use to advertise their favorite implementation or the slogan of the week.
If it gets mangled by a transport, it doesn't cause the protocol any
problems. The ASCII armor still transfers the secure object.

I don't see the problem in the comment line being UTF-8 (and it never
occurred to me that it wasn't). After all, there's an IETF meta-rule that
text is supposed to be UTF-8 unless there's a really, really good reason
for it not to be. So I have to ask -- why shouldn't someone be able to put
UTF-8 there? What's wrong with it?

	Jon