Re: Armor text change

[Jon Callas <[e-mail]>]

On 10 Jan 2006, at 2:20 PM, David Shaw wrote:

>
> Here's two suggested language changes that flow from the recent
> discussion of armor:
>
> *******
>
> Section 6.2. Forming ASCII Armor has a sentence that reads:
>
>    The header lines, therefore, MUST start at the beginning of a  
> line, and
>    MUST NOT have text following them on the same line.
>
> Suggest to change it to:
>
>    The header lines, therefore, MUST start at the beginning of a  
> line, and
>    MUST NOT have text other than whitespace following them on the  
> same line.
>
> (i.e. add "other than whitespace")
>
> Ben Laurie pointed out the rationale that since the point of ignoring
> trailing whitespace in armored and clearsigned messages was to work
> around transport systems like mail that may add whitespace, then it is
> necessary to ignore whitespace on the header lines as well.
>

Done.

> *******
>
> This other change I do not feel particularly strongly about.  It may
> overspecify something that doesn't need it.  In section 6.2. Forming
> ASCII Armor, add something to the effect of:
>
>    Note that some transport methods are sensitive to line length.
>    While there is a limit of 76 characters for the Radix-64 data
>    (section 6.3), there is no limit to the length of Armor Headers.
>    Care should be taken that the Armor Headers are short enough to
>    survive transport.  One way to do this is to repeat an Armor Header
>    key multiple times with different values for each so that no one
>    line is overly long.
>

Done.

	Jon