Public review comments for xacml-json-http-v1.0-csprd03: 4.2.2.1 Shorth

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Comment type [editorial | technical] ? technical

Impact [major | minor] ? major?

The simplest and least confusing (to people) way to handle shorthand values is to just take the text after the last colon in the XML definition. This also gives a standard way to handle non-standard custom identifiers and future-proofs code against new categories added later.

While the document never gives a reason for allowing shorthand notations, it is mentioned that they are a “convenience”. For us, mapping

some:very:long:name:category-name to category-name

is more convenient than mapping it to CategoryName because there are fewer translation rules that need to be remembered.

By using text different from the original XML, this forces implementers to either hard-code these as special cases or implement an algorithm that is more complex than necessary. For people this adds another mapping they have to remember. It also makes the JSON less consistent with the XML, possibly adding confusion to conversations between implementers.

Please use the last component of the XML definition as the shorthand and not create new values.

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