Re: Communicating with Keyservers

["Tom Dowden" <tom dowden gmail com>]

Yes but WinPT for instance queries the keyserver using the following request
http://keyserver/pks/lookup?op=index&search=someone&options=mr
thereby giving a machine readable output (which is standard).

Seahorse on the other hand omits the options=mr and attempts to parse
the html (human readable) version of the output.

The format of the html output is not part of the standard
(http://ietfreport.isoc.org/idref/draft-shaw-openpgp-hkp/) and so
different implementations of the keyserver give different output.

For instance, Seahorse will parse the output of pgp.mit.edu but not
keyserver.noreply.org.
However, if the 'options=mr' attribute is passed then both servers
will return a standard, text output.

Hope this makes sense (and I am not missing something)

Happy Christmas everyone!

Tom



On 25/12/2007, Adam Schreiber <sadam clemson edu> wrote:
> On Dec 24, 2007 3:01 PM, Tom Dowden <tom dowden gmail com> wrote:
> > I have noticed that when getting a public key from a keyserver,
> > Seahorse does not request the data in a machine readable format, but
> > instead tries to parse the html output. This means that Seahorse is
> > only able to retrieve keys from keyservers that display their output
> > in a certain way.
> > Is there a reason for this?
>
> That's HKP (html key protocol), and I believe GPG does the same thing.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adam
>