Request for community consensus on what the signature tag should mean to us

Question

I'd like to open a discussion on what we should make of the signature since it appears to mean several things if you look over the existing questions we have that currently use this tag.

The clear use cases for this word on an Apple centric site would be as follows (feel free to edit this as needed):

• email signatures in various Mail client applications for OS X and iOS.
• handwriting capture or simulation tools using touch, stylus, mouse, etc..
• Preview app (among others) being able to use a camera / scanner to digitize and overlay a signature
• Apps or services designed to digitally sign a document to verify in some manner that a traceable entity has "approved" a specific version of a document. (Digital Notary services for real estate and contract comes to mind)
• code signing and public key cryptography where a signature is used to certify and/or timestamp a certain entity and a specific file so that others can verify that signing event.

I'd like to see if we have enough consensus to improve the tag wiki and summaries for handwriting, signature, digital-signature, and code-signing as well as decide if we need additional tags to map out the "signature" space a bit on the site.

Answer 1

Tags should only exist to help an audience of answerers find the questions they're looking for. I suspect there could exist an actual audience knowledgable about code signing / digital message signing who might be interested in finding and answering questions so tagged.

Maybe there's an audience for Digital Notary sorts of things; I could be persuaded.

There is no need for a signature tag referring to the bits at the end of an e-mail message separate from the tag for the mail program in question; no one is an expert in writing your name and contact information at the end of a message separate from knowing how to use e-mail programs well. If you're trying to figure out how to make program X use the <blink> tag in your signature, you don't need a signature expert, you need either an expert in that program, or in this case, better still, someone to ban you from ever using the internet again because the <blink> tag is evil.

The signature space doesn't need to be mapped out; it needs to be killed off. Remove the tag from e-mail signatures and make code-signing and signature both point to digital signature. Fewer tags = better.