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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