The reason nobody bothers with NCs is because they don't work very well in practice. They also have their own baroque matching rules that are not intuitive if you're from the land of UNIX globs.

(In fairness this is a self-fulfilling prophecy: a lot of validators handle NCs poorly or not at all, so there's no impetus to rely on them. But that's not something we can really save in the Web PKI's current state.)

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eqvinox 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> But that's not something we can really save in the Web PKI's current state.

I agree with your assessment but it's not an excuse to give up without trying. I hope this is just because I'm not looking in the right places, but I don't see people trying.

What really makes me salty is that there was enough energy to mess with the rules around EKU, the primary effect of which is that non-browser software is now starting to just ignore the EKU bits. Even if it would've amounted to nothing, I'd really rather that effort had gone into NCs.

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woodruffw 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think a lot of people have tried! The reason EKUs stuck where NCs haven’t is because EKU rules are simple (in relative terms) and OpenSSL didn’t make as much of a mess out of them.

	▲	eqvinox 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can't help but read your post as "OpenSSL didn't make a mess of EKUs so the CA/B had to fill that role instead" :/ (I really am salty about the EKUs. In a few years the EKU field will just be useless, due to operational annoyance driving devs to ignore it. Except in browsers of course.)