Re: [dss-dev] Data format guessing of data within Base64Data tag

[Stefan Drees <stefan@drees.name>]

On 24.04.13 08:04, Juan Carlos Cruellas wrote:
> ... See below intermixed...
> > first of all it should be clear, that no direct violation of
> > conformance is notable.
> mmm... I am not sure what you mean by that...and what do you think is
> the actual extent of this assertion...does this mean that any
> conformance violation is not notable, i.e. does not have big relevance?...

no. As I am a non-native english writer, please excuse. I meant 
"noticeable" or the like synonym to "observable".

I already stated (cf. in citation below) my remembrance of the 
motivation as why we did not write "This contains a base64 encoding of 
data that MUST NOT be XML." inside the <Base64Data> element" but instead 
only wrote "This contains a base64 encoding of data that are not XML. " 
(section 2.4.2 description of this attribute).

> > But, the reason for inventing Base64Data was not, to certify, that the
> > content is no XML. The motivation was: How can we tunnel/embed
> > something not being XML inside an xml container for signing purposes?
> > Just imagine an intermediate version of an xml document neither
> > wel-formed not valid.
> If it is not well formed then I doubt it could be detected as being XML
> by any well designed application. I think that any XML parser would
> throw an exception which should lead to the application to conclude that
> this is not XML....

that may well be, I just pointed to a use case, where dss offers a 
convenient robust sign slot for "wannabe-XML documents in early editing 
stages".


> Anyway, still I think that the present tense in the sentence that I
> highlighted has the value of a mandatory requirement...if we have
> different views, then I feel that it could make sense to ammend it in
> one sense or the other...however, if we could get more insight of what
> other implementers' reading, it would be great...

The former I doubt as outlined above, as no xml is not equivalent to 
"MUST NOT be xml" and the latter has already been requested :-)

> > How would you sign this as "your version of thursday, say 1300 CEST :-?
> >
> > As a server "programmer" I am still curious what might motivate a
> > service to parse something, the spec sees only as data ... ?
> not only data...."no XML data"....
> >  ...

All the best,
Stefan.