On Tue, 2002-04-16 at 10:07, Alan Horkan wrote: > > XML is quite useful in many ways but it has limitations. > > 2) Encryption is extremely ugly. > Am i missing something obvious? > What does encryption have to do with the document being in XML format. > I dont know how this works out in practice but at least in theory I > thought that you compress the document then encryption is the absolute > last step done. Encryption as a complete seperate task. With a zipfs you can add to the manifest that the contents are ciphered. That would be post document handling, and would be a feature that can be added to the zip manifest. > It would not be done not as an integral part of the document, that > cryptography would be left to the experts and you would just encrypt the > file irrespective of its contents or type. In the case of compression > it does not make sense to have to decompress the whole document every time > (tar.gz) and there are clear benifits to be able to easily access > different parts or the document, or have some parts uncompressed (zip) and > use existing tools (zcat). But I really think that the encryption should > be an almost completely seperate task. It is a separate task, completely independent of application scope. Ideally we should have more integration of criptography on the desktop, and I plan to do something about that, but linking with gpg isn't that hard. > Am i lost in computer science? Are there practical reasons for not doing > it this way. I would be interested to know. It's nice to support crypted files because of enterprise use. Not some rot13 looser cipher of course. Hugs, rui -- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Ghandi + So let's do it...?
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