Question about notations and domains

[David Shaw]

On Aug 8, 2013, at 5:17 PM, Khelben Blackstaff <eye.of.the.8eholder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings.
> 
> I am sorry if this is already answered but i could not find anything
> relevant in the archive.
> 
> Quick introduction: I got a new smart card and reader so i thought to
> create a temporary test key and document on my blog all the steps i
> did over the years. In the next post i want to describe the policy urls
> and notations i use.
> 
> If i have understood the standard correctly, notations should have
> the form tag at my.domain.tld using a domain i own because my meaning
> for "tag" might be different than someone else's. Is this correct ?

There are two namespaces here.  If a tag is defined by the IETF process, then there is no @domain at all.  The @domain tags are used when regular users want to define a tag.

Anyway, so it's true that you can use the @domain notation to differentiate between a tag you use and the same tag used by someone else, but this shouldn't be interpreted as that you should always use the local domain.  The domain is set by whoever defines the tag.

For example:

> Another question i have is about the pgpmime notation. I see many
> people using it verbatim "preferred-email-encoding at pgp.com=pgpmime".
> Shouldn't @pgp.com be changed to the domain of each user ?

In this case, the preferred-email-encoding tag was defined by the pgp.com people.  Thus preferred-email-encoding at pgp.com is the proper string to use.

David