Re: Implentation report update / OPTIONAL elements issue

Hi Jose -

Minor correction; my client also supports XKRSS-T9 as indicated in the
XKMS CR TEST-SUITE REPORT.

Regards,
Tommy

On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 04:06:19 +0100, Jose Kahan <jose.kahan@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been preparing the implementation report [1]. Thanks to Tommy and
> Yunhao and Guillermo for their feedback. Others are more than welcome to
> check it out and help complete it with their implementation experiences. Please
> tell me if I put something in it you wouldn't want to see there. The @@
> are the points I've not yet frozen.
> 
> Guillermo, could you tell me if we tested the HTTP bindings? I think we
> only tested the SOAP ones, so I'm not sure how to report this.
> 
> I think that there is a real issue on how XKMS servers have to interpret
> the OPTIONAL elements, and, in general, how these elements are to be
> interpreted. It's not clear if OPTIONAL is being used here in the XML
> Schema sense as an element or attribute that may appear or not in a
> message, rather than something that may or may not be supported by a
> client or a server.  This is ambiguous.
> 
> From the three points I got that required extra negotiations between
> client and servers, two concern optional elements. In one of them Tommy
> wrote
> 
> <quote>
>  If a server does not support the TimeInstant element, it should
> indicate a failure *unless* it includes the optional ValidityInterval.
> The danger being that if the client requests a TimeInstant and the
> server does not support it....
> </quote>
> 
> I think it's OK if a client doesn't support an element or decides to not
> send it in a request if it's optional. A client may chose to ignore it
> too. A server may decide to ignore it and do something different
> following a given implementation policy. On the other hand, I feel that
> it is wrong and that it is an interoperability problem if a server ignores
> the element because it didn't implement it and does something
> differently because the spec. said it was OPTIONAL and it didn't
> implement it.
> 
> What is your opinion about this? Do we need to add more text to the
> spec. saying that servers should understand all OPTIONAL elements?
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> -jose
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2001/XKMS/Drafts/test-suite/CR-XKMS-Summary.html
> -
> 
> 
>

Received on Wednesday, 2 March 2005 19:07:25 UTC