Re: Canonicalization

     "Canonize", in English, most often means one of two things:
1    To recognize as a saint.
2    To admit to a "canon" of distinguished works.

     "Canonicalize" is a relatively new term which means to convert
something to a canonical form, and it does not appear in many standard
dictionaries, nor does "canonicalization" which is the noun for that
process.  As you may know, most English adjectives ending in "...al" have a
corresponding verb "...alize" which means to make something take on the
condition defined by the adjective.

          Tom Gindin

"Gregor Karlinger" <gregor.karlinger@iaik.at>@w3.org on 08/24/2000 07:46:35
AM

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To:   "XML" <w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org>
cc:
Subject:  Canonicalization



Hi all!

Maybe this question is kind of philosophical, but does anybody of
you know why the term "Canonicalization" is written as it is?

Recently I tried to find out, what it means to produce a canonical
form of something:

According to the Merriam-Webster Englisch Dictionary [1] the only
explanation which fits is:

  to canonize: to treat as illustrious, preeminent

This makes sense, since the canonical form of an XML-Document is
a prominent form of many representaions for the logical XML structure.

But the noun for the process of canonizing something is:

  canonization

However, I could not find "canonicalization" or "canonicalize" in any
dictionary I have access to.

---
[1] http://www.m-w.com/

Regards, (A completely confused) 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
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Received on Thursday, 24 August 2000 11:06:03 UTC