Re: Dereferencing a Reference with no URI attribute

On Friday 06 December 2002 09:51 am, Sean Mullan wrote:
> I have a question about dereferencing (or identifying)
> a Reference without a URI attribute. Section 4.3.3.1 of
> xmldsig-core states, 4th paragraph:
>
> "If the URI attribute is omitted altogether, the receiving
> application is expected to know the identity of the object".
>
> Further on, in section 4.3.3.2, it states:
>
> "Unless the URI-Reference is a 'same-document' reference as defined
> in [URI, Section 4.2], the result of dereferencing the URI-Reference
> MUST be an octet stream."
>
> Does the statement above apply to a Reference with no URI
> attribute?

Interesting question, from the text my initial reading is that an "implicit 
same-document reference" is not precluded. If fact, I'd expect this might 
be common in the context of implicit references.

> Can it be represented as either an octet stream or
> a node set? Or, since it is undefined, is it technically NOT a
> same-document reference, and therefore MUST be dereferenced/identified
> as an octet stream?

While an interesting question, is this motivated by an actual example? I'm 
wondering about the interop implications of this. For example, if I had a 
signature with an implicit reference to a node-set, the first transform  
might require a node-set for processing. Is this a problem? I don't see how 
as the other side is already expected to know what the initial object is 
(i.e., node-set).

Received on Friday, 6 December 2002 11:36:45 UTC