- From: Joseph Reagle <reagle@w3.org>
- Date: Fri, 19 Apr 2002 11:26:38 -0400
- To: ian@w3.org, www-tag@w3.org
- Cc: bobatk@microsoft.com, w3c-ietf-xmldsig@w3.org, www-xkms@w3.org
I'm noting that QNames are increasingly being used as identifiers within specifications. For example, XKMS is moving this way given the precedence set by SOAP, I'm seeing it in other ws-security work as well. My primary question is an architectural one: are these acceptable replacements for URIs as identifiers within our specifications? (They're certainly easier to read!) What is the identifier, the string "foo:bar" or the tuple [0]? Do we expect all specs to treat them uniformly in the next version of XML? What about present versions? My second question is an unfounded question about security implications. I haven't thought it through, but I wonder if there's any security ambiguities arising from the use of QNames as identifiers within an attribute value. When you sign a document via XML Canonicalization, it's attribute value is a string-value (not an "expanded-name" in XPath terminology, nor a QNAME in others'), but it also doesn't rewrite prefixes either so I feel safe. UDDI's schema-centric c14n [1] does rewrite namespace prefixes [2], but it's also schema centric -- I'm not sure what the result is there. (Bob?) And in other applications, where both sorts of processing might be done (attributes as strings versus QNAMEs) it's hard to say... [0] http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xmlschema-2-20010502/#QName [1] http://www.uddi.org/pubs/SchemaCentricCanonicalization-20020213.htm [2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-ietf-xmldsig/2002JanMar/0204
Received on Friday, 19 April 2002 11:26:40 UTC