RE: Comments on the requirements draft

Blair wrote:
There have been multiple discussions where
there is an implicit assumption that one can partially encrypt a
document, attribute values in particular, while not affecting
non-encryption aware recipients.

I reply:
I certainly agree that one cannot assume this behaviour as the
default but it does so happen that it does work for some XML
protocols such as SMIL (see the recent emails regarding my
work with SMIL for details).  Though a non-encryption-aware
SMIL processor would be able to handle the encrypted SMIL
doc, this is because SMIL specifies that if an application
does not understand a namespace, it should ignore it.  

While agreeing we should not assume this behaviour, I think we 
need to keep in mind that a good number of XML applications will 
have this behaviour.

Ed