New issue: WS-AT, editorial, Too much ACID

[Alastair Green <alastair.green@choreology.com>]

Following discussion on need to avoid normative statements about the 
isolation and durability characteristics of participants in the WS-AT 
spec, the following paragraph from page 4, should be revised to avoid or 
soften references to visibility, and to ensure that the example's 
implications do not slide over into seemingly normative statements, e.g. 
use of the word "govern" could be replaced by "enable" per Tom's phrase 
in the discussion at F2F..

"Atomic transactions have an all-or-nothing property. The actions taken 
prior to commit are only tentative (i.e., not persistent and not visible 
to other activities). When an application finishes, it requests the 
coordinator to determine the outcome for the transaction. The 
coordinator determines if there were any processing failures by asking 
the participants to vote. If the participants all vote that they were 
able to execute successfully, the coordinator commits all actions taken. 
If a participant votes that it needs to abort or a participant does not 
respond at all, the coordinator aborts all actions taken. Commit makes 
the tentative actions visible to other transactions. Abort makes the 
tentative actions appear as if the actions never happened. Atomic 
transactions have proven to be extremely valuable for many applications. 
They provide consistent failure and recovery semantics, so the 
applications no longer need to deal with the mechanics of determining a 
mutually agreed outcome decision or to figure out how to recover from a 
large number of possible inconsistent states.
"Atomic Transaction defines protocols that govern the outcome of atomic 
transactions. It is expected that existing transaction processing 
systems wrap their proprietary mechanisms and interoperate across 
different vendor implementations."