ACTION 176: Text for 1.1 on use of Transforms with RetrievalMethod

I believe the intent here was to signal that using Transforms with
RetrievalMethod was a bad idea and that the feature would be altered in the
future. The action speaks to "deprecation" in 2.0, but I think we'd be
changing the syntax or feature so much that it would just be a non-option,
not deprecated.

This proposal also includes some explanatory text about how the spec ends up
defining RetrievalMethod for the built-in types, which seems to be a point
of confusion.

Suggested new text in section 4.4.3 before the schema fragment:

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The implication of these requirements is that when referencing one of the
defined KeyInfo types within the same document, or some remote documents, at
least one Transform is required to turn an ID-based reference to a KeyInfo
element into a child element located inside it. This is due to the lack of
an XML ID attribute on the defined KeyInfo types.
 
Note that while this syntax and dereferencing behavior allows for the use of
Transform child elements, this feature is considered risky, and is overly
complex and general for the use cases for which RetrievalMethod was
intended. A future version of this specification may deprecate or entirely
remove this feature in favor of a simpler, less general referencing model
more suitable for the specific purpose of key references. In the meantime,
use of this feature may lead to interoperability issues.

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-- Scott

Received on Saturday, 24 January 2009 04:31:55 UTC