Re: Comments on the 6 Apr Draft

At 09:50 5/4/2001 -0700, Blair Dillaway wrote:
>4.  I would like to suggest we eliminate the distinction between an
>encrypted "Element" and "Element ChildNodeList" in this discussion.

So following up from our call yesterday, to ground this in a specific term 
with a well-defined meaning:

In Infoset terminology, "There is an element information item for each 
element appearing in the XML document"
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/WD-xml-infoset-20010316/#infoitem.element

To test this with a scenario:

<1>
   <a/>
   <b/>
   <c/>
</1>

If we want to encrypt 1, there is a corresponding element information item 
with a children Property including (a,b,c). If we want to encrypt (a,b,c) 
... it wouldn't be accurate to call this set an element information item. 
They are the children property of an element information item. (And if we 
defined our own set of information set items not mapped to the children 
property, it'd be "non-standard" and it would permit by definition for (a,b) 
to be encrypted together, without including (c), which I don't think is our 
intent. Also, this set of element information items would include the 
children processing instruction, unexpanded entity reference, character, and 
comment information items that we need.)


In DOM, there is a NodeList interface: "The NodeList interface provides the 
abstraction of an ordered collection of nodes, without defining or 
constraining how this collection is implemented. "
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html#ID-536297177

However, is this so generic so as to not be very useful (see the definition 
of "interface Node" in 
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/idl-definitions.html).

However, there is the specific Element interface: 
http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html#ID-745549614  and it 
inherits the childNodes attribute from NodeList Interface:
   readonly attribute NodeList childNodes;
   http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Core/core.html#ID-1950641247

So (and I'm no expert, particularly on DOM) I find it difficult to come up 
with a single "word" and definition that accurately and narrowly captures 
the distinction between and element and its content...?

In Infoset-speak, we're encrypting an element item or its children property, 
in DOM-speak we're encrypting


__
Joseph Reagle Jr.                 http://www.w3.org/People/Reagle/
W3C Policy Analyst                mailto:reagle@w3.org
IETF/W3C XML-Signature Co-Chair   http://www.w3.org/Signature
W3C XML Encryption Chair          http://www.w3.org/Encryption/2001/

Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 16:28:26 UTC