Re: The (not so) great base-encoding debate of 2020 (was: Re: Question on use of base64 vs base64url in modern specifications)

On Mon, Apr 27, 2020 at 9:27 PM Manu Sporny <msporny@digitalbazaar.com>
wrote:

> Is this an esoteric discussion? Absolutely... but it goes to the heart
> of why developers feel strongly about this particular choice. They live
> and breath how this stuff is encoded and it has a direct impact on their
> productivity and the correctness of the programs that they write and run.
>

Manu, I very much appreciate you diving into this. I have been getting
bitcoin wallet developers interested in taking a look at cross-wallet
standards, and I'm also trying to move the languaging and architectural
approaches to support more than just digital asset wallets but also DID and
credential wallets.

I've written up today some thoughts about requirements for multiple
sequential or animated QR codes, among which are many message encoding
issues: https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/AirgappedSigning/issues/4

I've also repeated my thoughts on a bech32 like encoding approach for URI
and single QR codes in
https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/AirgappedSigning/issues/5

I'm also working on a document to try to puzzle through some other wallet
languaging issues about personas, wallets, purses, accounts, profiles,
master seeds, derived keys, etc. It still has a long way to go to work for
the bitcoin community, the broader blockchain community, much less the DID
ecosystem, but I feel is coming along quite well. If there are folk
interested, I'd be glad to invite you to the HackMD collaborative document
or schedule a Zoom session to walk through it.

— Christopher Allen

Received on Tuesday, 28 April 2020 04:41:34 UTC