NIP-39 External Identities Verification

[brianjcarroll]

On an app I'm working on, I'm implementing a way for users to verify ownership of their external accounts (Github, Twitter, etc). See here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/39.md#claim-types

The spec defines the verification text to be a large line of text in English with the npub encoded key at the end of the string. In the case of Github, here is the expected text:

Verifying my account on nostr My Public Key: "<npub encoded public key>"

This seems very brittle to me, because clients must parse a long string and depend on the user copying and pasting the correct verification text (spaces and all). Even more problematic is the text is English only, so this adds friction to the non English speaking world.

Why can the verification text not just simply be the public key? That would be a much simpler line to parse, and allow users from all spoken languages to verify their external profiles. Was there a reason for this design choice?