Notice: hex encoding being changed to lowercase for digest() and hmac() functions

I'd like to minimize the amount of telecon time we have to use on this 
issue,
so based on the information I have received from various sources (below), 
I'll change the XForms 1.1 draft back to lowercase for the hex encoded
results of digest() and hmac().

Nick, can you change the tests to remove the translate() function call, 
please?

The information has to do with reported implementations:

1) Nick reports that Chiba returns lowercase results

2) Keith Wells reports that the FF plugin returns lowercase results.
He also indicated that a Google search produced hits where
hex encodings of digest values either SHOULD or MUST be
lowercase for compatibility and interoperation with other apps.

3) Next, I asked Merle Sterling about the Ubiquity processor, and he
responded that not only does Ubiquity return the lowercase results,
but that he had  to add the lowercasing code to the FF extension in 
order to make it pass the tests.

4) This caused me to realize that anybody who reported a pass
before we changed the test would be already returning lowercase
results, which then covers the EMC processor.

Therefore, we have no implementations that are supporting the
advancement of XForms 1.1 that rely on case insensitivity, and putting
the results to lowercase is an easily implementable programming step.

Best regards,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
Blog RSS feed: 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/rss/JohnBoyer?flavor=rssdw





From:
John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
To:
public-forms@w3.org
Date:
03/09/2009 08:34 PM
Subject:
digest() and hmac() function results to lower case




Hi all, 

Why was it decided that the results of digest() and hmac() would be 
case-insensitive. 
I realize that the algorithms base-64 and hex *could* return upper or 
lower case letters, but is it really that hard for implementations to push 
the results to lower case? 
It just seems strange to push that translation onto the application author 
or form author. 

It's not a big deal either way, but I'm doing the spec work now, and it 
just looks so odd to say: 

<eg>digest('abc', 'SHA-1', 'hex')</eg> 
<p>returns <phrase diff="add">a string that under case-insenstive 
comparison is equal to </phrase> <code>
a9993e364706816aba3e25717850c26c9cd0d89d</code>.</p> 

Cheers, 
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
Blog RSS feed: 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/rss/JohnBoyer?flavor=rssdw