RE: Brown draft feedback on time stamping and on criticality flags from Phillip M Hallam-Baker on 1999-07-30 (w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org from July to September 1999)

From: Phillip M Hallam-Baker <pbaker@verisign.com>
Date: Fri, 30 Jul 1999 11:43:50 -0400
To: "Chris Smithies" <Chris_Smithies@penop.com>, <david.solo@citicorp.com>
Cc: <w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org>
Message-ID: <001601bedaa2$51948e80$6e07a8c0@pbaker-pc.verisign.com>

> If canonicalization entails loss of time-zone information, then I predict
> the FDA (for one) won't accept canonicalized time-stamps as signature
> time-stamps. Perhaps the solution would be to canonicalize the time-zone
> information separately.

This issue demonstrates one of the main problems with 'canonicalization'.
For canonicalization to be possible the transformation must be semantically
neutral.

Transformations which lose information are not semantically neutral. 
Therefore transforming dates to GMT is not semantically neutral.

I'm not particularly bothered by the canonicalization spec so long
as I am not forced to use it.


	Phill

Received on Friday, 30 July 1999 11:44:16 UTC