Comment regarding P3P Base Data Set W3C Working Draft 7 April 1999

Comment regarding

P3P Base Data Set
W3C Working Draft 7 April 1999

3. Abstract Elements, first paragraph

I had to read this paragraph 3 times before I thought I understood it, so I
decided to offer a version that I believe to be semantically equivalent but
slightly more transparent.

Original:

In some cases, there is a need to specify data elements that do not have
associated data values (e.g., when a service wishes to declare it keeps HTTP
logs) We call such special elements abstract. When abstract elements appear
within the same statement as other elements, this asserts that
non-enumerated data is collected in addition to the specified elements.
Abstract elements are syntactically distinguished by the fact their name
ends with an underscore "_".

Suggestion:

In some cases, a service will need to specify data elements that do not have
associated data values (e.g., when a service wishes to declare it keeps HTTP
logs) We call such special elements abstract. Including abstract data
elements within the same statement as data elements of the types listed
above indicates that the service will collect non-enumerated data in
addition to the data associated with the non-abstract elements. We
distinguish abstract from non-abstract data elements by assigning abstract
elements names whose last character is an underscore "_".

Tom Spitzer
EC Wise, Inc
tspitzer@acm.org
650-508-9223