Re: [Medup] Issues draft-birk-pep-trustwords (was: New Version Notification for draft-birk-pep-trustwords-03.txt)

[Alessandro Vesely <[e-mail]>]

On Fri 22/Mar/2019 23:55:40 +0100 Bernie Hoeneisen wrote:
> 
> The IANA Registration for trustwords (a basic concept applied in pEp)
> https://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-birk-pep-trustwords-03.txt
> has several open issues, we'd need your feedback on, e.g.:
> 
> 
> 1) Localization:
>    How should non-ASCII-7bit letters or language symbols be represented
>    in the wordlists? UTF-8? HTML-like encoding? IDNA? Any better solution?

UTF-8, the other precursors are not quite as universal.


> 2) Registration format:
>    The format for registrations of at IANA is normaly (peudo-)XML.
>    While XML is concise for registering wordlists, the files
>    for registration will contain lot of XML overhead and thus get rather
>    long. Is this an issue? Use another format, e.g. CSV?

If the registration requires a specification, a plain text format would seem to
be easier and more conforming to classic RFCs.  E.g.:

language code: en
bit size: 8
...

IANA may provide HTML, XML, CSV versions as needed.


> 3) ISO language code:
>    Which ISO language code either 639-1 or 639-3 shall be used, to
>    designate the language, i.e.,
>    ISO-639-1 (e.g., ca, de, en, ...) as currently used in pEp
>    implementations (running code) or ISO-639-3 (eng, deu, ita, ...)
>    With ISO-639-3 more languages can be addressed, in particular
>    less widespread languages and dialects.

ISO-639-1, the less languages the better.  Similar languages generate
confusion; for example, aig (Antigua and Barbuda Creole English) contains many
words that look like English, so it would be harder for a verifier to first
establish what wordlist is being used.


> 4) Bitsize (how many bits can be mapped with a wordlist):
>    e.g. a bitsize of 16 allows for a list containing 2^16 = 65536 words.
> 
>    Should this be kept open or should only certain values for bitsize
>    be allowed to be registerd?
>    If latter applies, which values are useful (e.g. 8, 12 and 16)


Open sound better.  Using wordlists may give rise to a totally new kind of
blockchains, where meaningful phrases are the target.  We shouldn't limit
creativity by imposing a fixed size.


jm2c

Ale
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