Again, as a wanna-be programmer, I *try* to use binary formats only where the data or information is peculiar to a particular program; if there's a chance that it will be shared with something else, I try to use text. The thing about all data is that most all of it eventually gets shared, even the stuff that one program might think proprietary to itself.

The general issue may be quite profound. If we want to use textual representations and general purpose text tools, then a digital signature _qua_ authenticator loses its use, since a text tool, because it is a general purpose text tool, cannot verify the signature.

Sorry - you lost me on this one. When I see a PGP signature on a posting, isn't that an ascii-fied digital signature? Doesn't the textual representation of that signature have value/meaning? The word "_qua_" (Latin, therefore italicized, represented by underlining) roughly means "as". The textual representation of a signature *as* text has no value *as* a signature; it's just an arbitrary collection of symbols. The value of a signature only arises when one performs a cryptographic operation on it, which by definition is not a textual operation. We all know the standard for displaying (length-limited) text. But the first characters at the top from left to right until the end-of-line. Move down one line and repeat. But how does one represent the _authentication_ information in text. Typeface? Color? A vertical bar? Enclosure? One solution might simply be to discard before viewing any text whose authentication information doesn't match, and then one can assume that all information that looks like it's authenticated actually is authenticated. The PGP cleartext signature format, for example, suffers seriously in facial readability because the signer is only implicitly identified by the Key ID, and that's inside the armor block! Eric