attribute exchange value encoding
Johnny Bufu
johnny at sxip.com
Fri May 25 00:15:56 UTC 2007
Hello list,
While at IIW, I asked around what people thought about the encoding
mechanisms we've added recently, in order to allow for transferring
any data types. The consensus was that everyone would prefer
something simpler and lighter.
So I've rewritten the encoding section, such that:
- for strings, only the newline (and percent) characters are required
to be escaped,
(to comply with OpenID's data formats), using percent-encoding;
- base64 must be used for encoding binary data, and defined
an additional field for this:
openid.ax.encoding.<alias>=base64
Please review section 3.3 Attribute Values to see if there are any
issues.
One remaining question is about the choice of encoding for strings.
Percent-encoding (RFC3968) seems the simplest from a spec
perspective, however some libraries provide (better) support for the
older URL-encoding (RFC1738), which throws '+' characters into the
mix. Which do you think would work best for implementers, users, and
would cause less interop problems?
Johnny
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