- From: Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
- Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2020 11:23:00 -0400
- To: public-credentials@w3.org
On 4/24/20 3:24 PM, Christopher Allen wrote: > But the question I have then is, why use the older base64 at all? Why > not completely deprecate base64 entirely for brand new standards? Or is > it solely that base64URL also "forbids line separators"? Is this the > only reason why the older base64 is still used in new standards? Or am I > missing something? It's worse than that... there are 11 variants for base64 (and some even crazier variants that Digital Bazaar has seen in the wild): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64#Variants_summary_table Base64 is a mess specifically because of all of the optionality... we shouldn't pull it forward into new standards unless only *one* encoding of base64 is settled upon for very specific use cases. Even base64url has two variants (a padded version and an unpadded version). The Multibase spec recognizes the 4 most widely used base64 formats: https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-multiformats-multibase-00.html#rfc.appendix.D.1 In any case, boo base64 (for 99% of use cases where you're encoding something less than a few hundred bytes in size). For stuff that's larger, like PNG images... base64pad all the way. *grabs popcorn, awaits encoding-format related Chair throwing* -- manu -- Manu Sporny - https://www.linkedin.com/in/manusporny/ Founder/CEO - Digital Bazaar, Inc. blog: Veres One Decentralized Identifier Blockchain Launches https://tinyurl.com/veres-one-launches
Received on Sunday, 26 April 2020 15:23:13 UTC