On Sep 17, 2012, at 22:09, Dick Hardt <[email protected]> wrote: > Is there any reason to NOT use URL safe base64 encoding?
No. I think Jim's arguments are very confused about the reasons for providing choice in a protocol. Choice is fundamentally bad for interoperability. Always. However, you do provide choice when there is something you win from this choice. (E.g., crypto agility is demonstrably necessary.) If you can't demonstrate such a win, you eliminate choice as much as possible. Since there is zero advantage for base64 over base64url, this is a no-brainer: nail it down. For those that would like another example for this: In the IETF, we chose network byte order. Once. For everything. Other protocols have a hodgepodge, or, worse, actively negotiate byte order. (There are some theoretical advantages for doing this between two systems that are one of the other byte orders. In reality, it means you have to provide two code paths and neither is optimized as well as it could be if the choice had been nailed down. And you get a nice helping of unexpected interop failures on top.) Again: nail it down. Once. For everything in this protocol. Grüße, Carsten _______________________________________________ jose mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/jose
