From: wcs@anchor.ho.att.com (Bill Stewart +1-908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com)
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 92 15:31:40 PST
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: Signing ascii text
Message-ID: <9212232331.AA20426@anchor.ho.att.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text


The problem with signing whitespace-compressed canonicalized text isn't the 
loss of readability, since you can send the non-canonicalized version for humans.
The problem is that sometimes the white space IS significant
	Project-Schedule        1992   1993  1994
	Phase 1                   X
	Phase 2                          X
	Phase 3				       X
would acquire the same signature if you moved the Xs to different columns.
If we're going to treat white space in text as significant, we made need
to adopt a scheme such as MIME's =xx content-transfer-ncodings;
Otherwise we need to declare by fiat that white space is not significant 
unless protected by an encoding.
		Bill Stewart