A usability gap in fingerprint rendering and parsing

[Jerome Baum]

On 2012-01-06 13:41, Werner Koch wrote:
> Note that leading and trailing spaces are allowed but the double space
> in the middle of the fingerprint is required:
> 
>   $ gpg2 -k '  8061 5870 F5BA D690 3336 86D0 F2AD 85AC 1E42 B367   ' 
>   gpg: error reading key: No public key

Is this necessary for a technical reason? I'm just thinking about the
scenario where transmits his human-readable fingerprint in a medium that
collapses repeated spaces (think e.g. HTML).

I know we can say it's their fault (and rightfully so), but I'm just
thinking from a usability standpoint, if there is no security benefit
and it's not a lot of work to add this, it could be useful.

(In fact I think I'd rather see a requirement to not have surrounding
whitespace and instead be less sensitive about inner whitespace.)

But enough nit-picking, the "complaint to code" time was amazing! :)


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