RE: minor naming point

That's what I had responded to my coworker (I have been involved in i18n in
the past).  However, it "feels inappropriate" to me to use the abbreviation
in the standard, but as I said I don't feel strongly about it.  My thinking
is that "c14n" is pretty opaque for somebody who isn't familiar with that
method of abbreviation, and since there isn't a need to abbreviate we should
spell it out.  I wouldn't argue anything that you've said.

-Mark Bartel, JetForm

-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph M. Reagle Jr.
To: Mark Bartel
Cc: 'IETF/W3C XML-DSig WG '
Sent: 9/14/99 12:43 PM
Subject: Re: minor naming point

At 11:25 99/09/14 -0400, Mark Bartel wrote:
 >Here's part of a coworker's response to my ftf trip report:
 >
 >> I'm sure this is a picky point, but it took me a long time to figure
out
 >> that "c14n" was "canonicalization".  Ok, convenient short-hand for
 >> informal communication.  But, it's actually in a tag in the spec,
 >> <c14nalg>.  Yikes!  Yet, we have <transformations> instead of
<t12ns>,
 >> and the fairly ubiquitous term "signature" which could be replaced
 >> with "s7e".  The people who thought this up could probably also save
a
 >> lot of space/typing my storing only two digits for year values.
 >
 >While I don't feel that strongly on the issue, XML is supposed to be
 >readable.  I don't think the twelve bytes saved per signature are
 >significant enough to warrant the abbreviation.  But then, my favorite
 >applications aren't particularly sensitive to size.

c14n is quite common in the Web community and spreads like a virus once
people first see it. comes from i18n (internationalization), can be
generalized for A(X-3)ion words.

_________________________________________________________
Joseph Reagle Jr.   
Policy Analyst           mailto:reagle@w3.org
XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://w3.org/People/Reagle/

Received on Tuesday, 14 September 1999 12:57:55 UTC