RE: Comments on "XML-Signature Syntax and Processing"

At 17:12 12/18/2000 -0800, Brian LaMacchia wrote:
>Um, that's not how I remember the intent of these items.  It was my
>understanding that we were defining <SPKIData> and <PGPData> as known tags
>where the internal sub-elements would be defined by the respective working
>groups.

Hi Brian, I bet your recollection is better than mine on this note.

>   We went a further step to define some of the PGP sub-structure
>(based on advice from members of the OpenPGP WG).  I think the ANYs should
>be present both for PGPData and SPKIData.

However, I was going to ask even if that what was intended, should it be so 
now? SPKIData is provided for a particular a non XML representation, "The 
content of this element type is expected to be a Canonical S-expression." As 
is PGPData: PGPKeyID and PGPKeyPacket are of type string and ds:CryptoBinary 
respectively.

Given our philosophy of extensibility and the use of XML I'd think that if 
WGs created actual XML structures, they should have their own root element 
that sits under KeyInfo under their own namespace. Under my understanding, 
the following namespaces had well specified meanings:
[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#X509Data
         X509 is fairly extensive
[2] http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#PGPData
         encoding of KeyID and KeyPacket
[3] http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#SPKIData
         SPKIData for S expressions
and if someone supports any of these, it's clear what it means. Having ANY 
within these structures still requires the use of an external namespace, but 
makes the ability to say, "I support [1,3]" ambiguous.


__
Joseph Reagle Jr.
W3C Policy Analyst                mailto:reagle@w3.org
IETF/W3C XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://www.w3.org/People/Reagle/

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 2000 10:06:35 UTC