NEW ISSUE: 3990 [Guidelines] Content in Section 5.7 is unclear

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=3990

Title: [Guidelines] Content in Section 5.7 is unclear

Description: Section 5.7 in the Guidelines document currently discusses several topics: identifying assertions using QNames, versioning assertions, specifying admissible policy subjects for an assertion, defining new policy subjects, external policy attachment, etc [1].  It's unclear what the intent of this section is supposed to be:

The first paragraph covers assertion versioning.  This material belongs in 5.9 [2].

The second paragraph claims that allowing assertions to be associated with arbitrary policy subjects leads to ambiguity in the interpretation of the policy.  It's not clear what ambiguity is being referred to.  The example in this paragraph describes an encryption assertion attached to an endpoint.  Is the ambiguity in the definition of the assertion?

The third paragraph discusses restricting assertions to specific policy subjects, which is also addressed in 3.1 [3].  Is this repetition deliberate?  This paragraph also mentions determining if a policy assertion is specific to a policy attachment mechanism.  We are not aware of any reason why a policy assertion would depend on the policy attachment mechanism used.  Lastly, this paragraph calls endpoint policy subjects behaviors and message policy subjects artifacts.  It's not clear why this distinction is made.

The last paragraph emphasizes the existence of policy subjects other than the WSDL policy subjects.  It's not clear why this is significant.

The intent of this section needs to be clarified or the ambiguous points removed.  We suggest removing the section.

Justification: The content in section 5.7 is duplicated and some of it is unclear.  If this section is dropped, the significant bits are covered in other sections.

Target: Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors

Proposal: Remove Section 5.7.

[1] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2006/ws/policy/ws-policy-guidelines.html?rev=1.8&content-type=text/html;%20charset=utf-8#typing-assertions
[2] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2006/ws/policy/ws-policy-guidelines.html?rev=1.8&content-type=text/html;%20charset=utf-8#lifecycle
[3] http://dev.w3.org/cvsweb/~checkout~/2006/ws/policy/ws-policy-guidelines.html?rev=1.8&content-type=text/html;%20charset=utf-8#assertion-target