proposal to deprecate compact policies

Dear all, 

compact policies in P3P 1.0 were added in the last minute. They were
very controversial but still made it into the 1.0 Recommendation. 

Now we have the new discussion about the compact format. 
This new discussion war triggered by feedback from web-site implementers
and by feedback from 2 P3P workshops. In fact, by aggregating the whole
rather complex structure of a full P3P Policy into a set of simple
tokens with no relationship to each other, the assertion made by compact 
policies can get inaccurate from blurry to heavy overstatements.

We discussed and offered to discuss the performance implications many
times. With known-hosts we make asynchronus evaluation even easier. We
offered to work on enhancing the compact format to give it at least 
'some' structure, but there was no interest.

Now the time has come to deprecate compact policies and to throw that
burden over board. This means, Web-sites can still put up some tokens to
make some P3P 1.0 agents happy, but the basis for semi-automatic
decision-making in P3P 1.1 will be only based on the full XML format. At
least, this is my suggestion.

Best, 

-- 
Rigo Wenning            W3C/ERCIM
Policy Analyst          Privacy Activity Lead
mail:rigo@w3.org        2004, Routes des Lucioles
http://www.w3.org/      F-06902 Sophia Antipolis

Received on Friday, 13 February 2004 09:14:33 UTC