RE: [xri] Re: Comment signing (was RE: [xri] CANCELLED: XRI TC Telecon Thursday 12/03)

["Scott Cantor" <cantor.2@osu.edu>]

Will Norris wrote on 2009-12-12:
> oops, also meant to clarify this last point.  My XPath is rusty, but
you're
> saying that an XPath query containing only a single element ID reference
> excludes comment nodes?

No. That syntax isn't an XPath query, it's a same-document URI reference.

(This is 1.1, but it's the same text as the original spec.)
http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-xmldsig-core1-20090730/#sec-Same-Document

> I couldn't find anything to that effect in the
> XPath spec, but that doesn't mean much.  I'm just curious why this syntax
> automatically drops comment nodes.

Basically because c14n over a node set doesn't strip comments automatically,
so using a "no comments" c14n algorithm would end up including comments.
It's a bug in the specs that they hacked around in a rather dumb way.

-- Scott