[OTR-dev] Whitespace tag clarification

offtherecord.*.tamschi at spamgourmet.com offtherecord.*.tamschi at spamgourmet.com
Sun Sep 1 08:09:02 EDT 2013


Currently the whitespace tag "consists of the following 16 bytes,
followed by one or more sets of 8 bytes indicating the version of OTR
Alice is willing to use [...]" with the bytes being hex representations
of tabs and spaces in ASCII/UTF-8.

As the protocol description doesn't mention a specific text encoding for
the underlying protocol, I think this should be changed to "[...] 16
characters [...]" and so on, for clarity and compatibility. The byte
values would be replaced with "tabs" and "spaces" in some form, maybe
mentioning the Unicode code points to keep it precise.

The current draft is problematic with UTF-16 and other encodings where
these characters are larger or otherwise differently encoded, in so far
as a "strict" implementation would be either impossible or most likely
incompatible with an encoding transition or sanity check somewhere in
the network.




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