Re: Processing Instructions Section / One pass processing

See at @@@

Donald E. Eastlake, 3rd
IBM, 17 Skyline Drive, Hawthorne, NY 10532 USA
dee3@us.ibm.com   tel: 1-914-784-7913, fax: 1-914-784-3833

home: 65 Shindegan Hill Road, RR#1, Carmel, NY 10512 USA
dee3@torque.pothole.com   tel: 1-914-276-2668


"Joseph M. Reagle Jr." <reagle@w3.org> on 12/20/99 07:32:34 PM

To:   Donald Eastlake/Hawthorne/IBM@IBMUS
cc:   w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org
Subject:  Re: Processing Instructions Section / One pass processing



At 15:28 99/12/17 -0500, dee3@us.ibm.com wrote:
 >The one pass feature is a purely optional to use and
 >optional to implement hint.

I'm not too keen on this because:
1. I don't know how important a requirement [1] it is nor how likely it is
that it will be implemented.

@@@ I'm not sure either but it seems to me there will be people that want
to sign huge things in XML.  While they can always handle this in an
application specific way, it's reasonable to include a general mechanism.

2. I generally prefer not to have these sort of optional features (bloat).

@@@ I tend to reserve the word bloat for things that are useless or things
best provided by a separate orthogonal mechanism which are being combined
into a package for marketing purposes.  I think that all recent versions of
Netscape and Internet Explorer are bloatware.  But I don't see an
orthogonal separate way to provide one pass signature processing of XML
data.

3. PIs are a bit of a black sheep in the XML world from what I understand,
they are generally discouraged.

@@@ But I carefully wrote it so it could be an ordinary element or a PI,
depending on which way we want to go.  If it's an element, you need to
provide for it in your DTD/Schema but that's not so bad.  Using a PI has
advantages and disadvantages.  But we can just take the mundane course and
use an element.

[1] It isn't listed in:
        http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/WD-xmldsig-requirements-19991014.html
_________________________________________________________
Joseph Reagle Jr.
Policy Analyst           mailto:reagle@w3.org
XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://www.w3.org/People/Reagle/

@@@ Thanks,
@@@ Donald

Received on Saturday, 25 December 1999 05:58:49 UTC