DR305 -- ongoing discussion

By vote of the Working Group in Redmond during the December 13-14 
face to face meeting,  I've been asked to revise the wording of
DR305.

=== From the 2000-12-19 XP Requirements WD:

>DR305 (Absorbs old DRs: DR003) Ednote: Under consideration. Owner: David Ezell
> 
>The XML protocol must provide facilities that encourage a common approach for 
>providing features such as  authentication, encryption,payment, reliable
delivery, 
>sessions and transactions. Such facilities might include optional 
>standardized header and/or trailer elements. These facilities should encourage 
>"best-practice" in implementing the required features.

=== Proposed revision:

>R305 
>
>In order to encourage a consistent approach for developing features which are
>out of scope for the XP specification itself, the XML Protocol Specification
>must provide facilities and enumerate favored ways of applying those facilities
>in support of such features.
>
>Examples of features which are out of scope but for which consistent design
>will undoubtedly be beneficial are 1) message authentication and encryption 
>(perhaps using SMIME, SSL, or digital signatures), 2) sessions and transactions

>(possibly by providing globally unique identifiers for messages), and
>3) service definition and discovery.
>
>SOAP 1.1 facilities such as the "Header" element and the "encodingStyle",
>"mustUnderstand", and "actor" attributes are examples of the kinds of 
>support facilities and use patterns addressed in this requirement.

=== Rationale:

Note that the first sentence is the actual requirement.

Item "c" in the following list of specific comments as well as the need to 
include older DRs led to a rephrasing of the requirement (as opposed to a 
gentler rework).  

Specific comments from the f2f:

a-- "facilities might..." ought to be "facilities should".
b-- The term "implementing" is problematic.
c-- Suggesting possible outcomes for this requirement might help clarify it.
d-- "payment" should not be included in the list of features.

Other observations:

The spirit of DR305 is that the WG (through the XP specification) should
acknowledge
that certain classes of features will be required for a large number of XP
applications,
and that even though the design of these features is out of scope for this WG,
everyone
would benefit from some guidance on "best-practice" in creating these features.
Some
other DRs were removed from the requirements document with the understanding
that
their mention in DR305 would be an adequate capture of their essence.  These
include
the following:

DR046
>xml protocol should work well with popular security mechanisms. 
>Popular ones are smime/ssl/digital signatures.

DR051 
>A message must have a globally unique identifier. 

DR065 
>Must not preclude transaction support, discovery of service definitions and
security.

Thanks,
David Ezell

Received on Friday, 29 December 2000 16:57:54 UTC