Re: [certid] Need to define "most specific RDN"

[Peter Saint-Andre <[e-mail]>]

On 6/30/10 11:46 AM, Martin Rex wrote:
> Peter Saint-Andre wrote:
>>
>> Based on feedback from you and from Kurt, I have changed the foregoing
>> paragraph to:
>>
>>    Certificates are binary objects -- they are encoded using
>>    distinguished encoding rules (DER).  Thus, the generation of
>>    displayable (a.k.a. printable) renderings of certificate subject and
>>    issuer names means that the DER-encoded sequences are decoded and
>>    converted into a "string representation" before being rendered.
>>    Because a DN is an ordered sequence, order is preserved in the string
>>    representation of a DN.  However, because an RDN is an unordered
>>    group of attribute-type-and-value pairs, the string representation of
>>    an RDN can differ from the canonical DER encoding; in the canonical
>>    encoding, the RDN that is nearest to the root of the naming tree is
>>    called the "most significant" RDN and the RDN that is deepest in the
>>    tree (and that therefore distinguishes the relative name) is called
>>    the "most specific" RDN.  See [LDAP-DN] for details.
> 
> I'm actually confused by refering to one end with "most significant" and
> the other with "most specific".  Couldn't we just drop the "most significant"
> entirely and use "least specific" / "most specific" for the two ends?

Given that we never use the term "most significant" in this I-D, I'd say
we can remove any mention of it.

Peter

-- 
Peter Saint-Andre
https://stpeter.im/