Enveloped Signature Transform, XPath Transform: function here()

Hi all!

I am facing severe troubles with implementing the REQUIRED
Enveloped Signature Transform, since it violates (in my
opinion) the basic concept of transforms:

1. A transform has one implicit parameter: An octet stream
   form the Reference or the output of an earlier Transform.

2. All other parameters can be specified via the XML content
   of the Transform element.

3. There are no other means to tell the Transforms about 
   additional parameters.

Now, if I have to implement the Enveloped Signature Transform,
I cannot compute the result of the function here(), which is
used in the XPath expression for this transform. It makes
no difference if I implement the transform using a XPath
engine or with other means: 

The result of here() should be the node which 
bears the XPath expression. But it is impossible to get this
result into the Transform, since a Transform operates on
Octets and not on a tree.

Of course it is possible to write a hack, in which the Transform
implementation has access to the tree where the XPath expression's
parent resides, and which does not operate on a Octet input stream.

But, it IS a hack, and does not fit in the concept of Transforms,
which should be a generic mechanism as described above.

I don't see any really good reason to provide the Enveloped Signature
Transform at all, since the author should know where the Signature
element resides in the XML document, and can cut it out by means
of an XPath transform, which does not contain the here() function.
At least we should consider not to make this Transform REQUIRED. 

Finally, the same problem applies to the XPath transform itself, because
this sinister here() function is added to the function library by
our specification.

Regards, Gregor
---------------------------------------------------------------
Gregor Karlinger
mailto://gregor.karlinger@iaik.at
http://www.iaik.at
Phone +43 316 873 5541
Institute for Applied Information Processing and Communications
Austria
---------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Friday, 11 August 2000 06:48:28 UTC