RE: Comments on the requirements draft

Ed, 
 
From your statement below I assume you agree with the last sentence in
my posting which you left off:
 
    I would like to see us generally warn applications against making
this assumption 
    without thorough consideration of how the existing, non-encrypted,
documents are being
    processed by all potential recipients.
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Ed Simon [mailto:ed.simon@entrust.com]
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 5:28 AM
To: xml-encryption@w3.org
Subject: 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

Received on Sunday, 25 March 2001 00:29:46 UTC