- From: Rich Salz <rsalz@zolera.com>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 15:07:34 -0400
- To: www-xml-schema-comments@w3.org
As for canonical form, I don't see why adding fourteen internal spaces per line is noticeably better than not doing so, but I don't care all that much. As far as the equal sign padding, I have a much stronger position. The padding is required. The RFC is quite clear, and padding is a very different subject from whitespace, where there is significant history of leniency. Among the packages with which I am familiar, Python, OpenSSL, and OpenLDAP (dating back to the first UMich distributions) all require the padding. If you make it optional, then you have supersetted the spec in a fairly powerful way, and it would be misleading to still call it base64. There is an even stronger argument: what is the "canonical" form? I can easily deal with whitespace -- ignore it, as the spec says. But which of the following are legal base64 encodings of foo? Zm9vCg Zm9vCg= Zm9vCg== Zm9vCg=== Zm9vCg====== (6 ='s) If padding can be elided, why can't it be added? Keep it clear, follow the spec, don't break installed code: leave the padding as the RFC says. Thank you. /r$ -- Zolera Systems, Your Key to Online Integrity Securing Web services: XML, SOAP, Dig-sig, Encryption http://www.zolera.com
Received on Friday, 27 July 2001 15:07:25 UTC