- From: Paul Prescod <papresco@calum.csclub.uwaterloo.ca>
- Date: Fri, 23 May 1997 21:29:56 -0400
- To: Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com>
- CC: "'Matthew Fuchs'" <matt@wdi.disney.com>, w3c-sgml-wg@w3.org
Andrew Layman wrote: > > Matthew Fuchs asks, in regards to a digital signature, "How we know just > what the signature covers"? In other words, what is the scope of the > digital signature? > > The digital signature people are working on this question, and have some > good ideas. From what I can see, this is an issue of the semantics of > digital signatures, but not an XML problem. We don't need to solve it > for them, merely give them the basic tools from which they can construct > a solution. (Those tools being a way to put an unambiguous, structured > digital signature element in or on any element.) I believe Mathew's real question to be what does this mean: <DSIG>398fjfj3jf98ejfw3ojhr<BOLD>jfoieawjfojawe98fuj32</BOLD>joIEWJOfj</DSIG> In the SGML world we have a mechanism for making that impossible so that the author and the programmer can know what each other is thinking about. When these database people talk about throwing away validation they are really talking about throwing away this contract of data consistency. Paul Prescod
Received on Friday, 23 May 1997 21:30:34 UTC