RE: Enveloped signatures and XPath

At 1:25 PM 3/27/0, John Boyer wrote:
>serialize(), however, cannot output UTF-8 because it is an XPath function,
>which must output a string.  The details of what that means are specific to
>the XPath implementation itself.  Transcoding to UTF-8 is not an action that
>fits within XPath.

Strings are series of characters, not of bytes.  The encoding is not relevant.

I'm still not understanding why the digest can't be based on a canonical
serialization of whatever result comes from the XPath expression.  Every
XML implementation must support UTF-8, so it's not any kind of overhead to
require it here.  There are issues beyond encoding, like attribute
ordering, that have to be mandated in serialization, so the win of having
the serialize() function seems negligible.

-Chris

--
Christopher R. Maden, Solutions Architect
Yomu
One Embarcadero Center, Ste. 2405
San Francisco, CA 94111

Received on Tuesday, 28 March 2000 03:52:25 UTC