Text representation

[BasileiosKal]

Tracking issue for a comment made by @andrewwhitehead in #230.

In the draft we are referring to text as ASCII string. This is kinda confusing as often ASCII refers to the characters octet encoding rather than the characters themselves. Alternatives include: Text, String, Character sequences etc.

Note: the only place we actually use this terminology is for encoding the ciphersuite id and the DSTs.

Some questions are:

• do we want to disallow non-ASCII chars??
• do we want generic "string" encoding rules (i.e., as in #230) or we should just define the DSTs and ciphersuite id to be octet strings from the start (i.e., ASCII encoded strings). This is what the h2c and bls curve do AFAIK.

[OR13]

U+1FAE0

[tplooker]

+1 to the proposal to simplify the specification to state the octet representation of any strings rather than define complex string encoding rules

[BasileiosKal]

Discussed on WG call 9th of January. Next step is to open PR on this approach (use the octet representation of string rather than the strings).

[BasileiosKal]

Discussed on WG call 23d of January. Next step is to open PR with example.