+1 to Mike's comments. Usefulness of the standard is the important thing.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Jones Sent: Friday, June 07, 2013 7:19 AM To: Richard Barnes; [email protected] Subject: Re: [jose] What are we doing here? Excellent question, Richard, because it gets to the heart of why the JOSE specs are already highly successful and widely adopted. - We are building useful tools that solve real problems for developers. - We are practically demonstrating the value of rough consensus and running code. - We are making simple things simple. - We are making complex things possible, when necessary (but not at the expense of keeping simple things simple). - We are developing specs with an explicit goal of enabling ubiquitous adoption. - We are developing specs guided by practical engineering tradeoffs to enable commonly useful functionality in a straightforward manner. The level of adoption, with dozens of deployed implementations, is compelling evidence that we've already achieved the goals above. It's time to "ship it", as making the JOSE specs actual standards will only increase their adoption and value to the industry. That's what we're doing here. -- Mike P.S. I would be careful reasoning from the premise of "The perfect protocol is one from which nothing can be removed". By that logic, the perfect specification is the null specification, which leaves all possibilities open, and solves no actual problems. ;-) From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Richard Barnes Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2013 2:44 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [jose] What are we doing here? The conversation about "typ" has brought us back to a familiar question for this working group -- what are we trying to do here? The current document is ambiguous on this topic. On the one hand, it mostly covers the crypto bases, with things like "alg" and "enc". On the other hand, it mixes in application design concepts like "typ" and "crit". The result is a spec that's ambiguous in purpose and complex. If I'm building an application with this, how do I decide what goes in the "crit" field, or what values to use for "typ"? The charter for this working group is not ambiguous on this topic. This group is chartered to do signing and encryption. The JOSE formats should carry the parameters needed to perform those operations. Anything else is extraneous, and in the spirit of "The perfect protocol is one from which nothing can be removed", should be removed. Now, I'm not going to be a hard-liner on this. I won't complain about "zip" and "cty", since they are clearly defined and have clear use cases. But "crit" and "typ" are so ambiguous and so little supported by use cases*, that they really should go. </rant> --Richard
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