RE: Comments on core-991001

At 16:11 99/10/05 -0700, Barb Fox (Exchange) wrote:
 >In IETF drafts, the open technical issues are usually a separate section at
 >the end which you already have. 

Understood. However given these comments qualify text rather than merely
identifying holes, I obviously prefer them to be in-line and in context.
This is a very common convention amongst W3C WD's (see [1,2] for recent
examples.) While rarer, it is not impossible to find within ietf-drafts
[3,4].

 >Reading the "editorial comments" in the
 >current draft, however, we find statements like "...However, these
 >applications abuse the notion of the open Web model..." not appropriate to
 >an IETF draft since they are clearly not technical. 
 
I do not believe this. I am trying to annotate sections that deserve
particular technical attention so as to (1) identify issues such that the WG
can come to clarity on what the actual issue is prior to finding an answer,
(2) identify unstable text for external reviewers and (3) draw early
attention to those areas that I think will prompt the Director's attention
at one point or another: better early than late. Also, these comments serve
a useful purpose in forging consensus in that people are more willing to
agree to a proposal if their concerns are captured. Otherwise, people become
stubborn and "vote" no-go instead of a go-with-caveat that can then be
tested by time, implementation, and external review.

If you feel this particular text (or any other) is not quite technical
enough it is serving its purpose: I probably have not written it well. I am
not speaking of open/closed content models for element nesting [6] but of
the model in the context of Tim's Web model [7]. I think what I am trying to
capture is something similar to the "design regret" associated with XML1.0
IDREF in that IDREF only provides for inside-the-document linking.
Consequently, my concern is that if we have a data model that permits
parsers to pull out the relations between signatures and their referants,
this type of feature if defined as syntactical optional will remain
syntactically valid, but will break the data model parsers. Now I'm not
exactly sure where everyone stood on this, so I added the text based on [8]

 >Finally, the formatting you're using for both (boxed) will not be carried
 >into the IETF draft. We're sure you know that where they are placed now is
 >within the body of the sections and would appear as normal descriptive
text.

Understood. However, I did not believe it to be misleading in the text
version of the text document [5]. After examining the way ietf-draft
conventions, I believe capitalizing the "notes" will be even more effective.
I will do this in the next version.


[1] Paged Media Properties for CSS3 
  http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-css3-page-19990928
[2] XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes
  http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xmlschema-2-19990924/
[3] Japanese Character Encoding Scheme for Internet Messages

http://info.internet.isi.edu/in-drafts/files/draft-yamamoto-charset-iso-2022-
jp-02.txt
    IMPLEMENTATION NOTE: Even if a message composer does not provide any
    input method for graphic character sets which is not used in
[4] Classical IP and ARP over ATM
  http://www.csc.gatech.edu/~pinar/rfcs/draft-ietf-ion-classic2-00.txt
   Note:  ... The IP over ATM Working
   Group expects ATM Forum NSAPA numbers (Structure 1) to predominate
   over E.164 numbers (Structure 2) as ATM endpoint identifiers ...
[5] http://www.w3.org/Signature/Drafts/xmldsig-core-991001.html,text
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/NOTE-XML-data/#OpenClosed
[7] The Web Model 
  http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Model.html
[8] bullet 2 of Syntax Discussion
  http://www.w3.org/Signature/Minutes/990930-tele.html

_________________________________________________________
Joseph Reagle Jr.   
Policy Analyst           mailto:reagle@w3.org
XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://w3.org/People/Reagle/

Received on Wednesday, 6 October 1999 16:36:28 UTC