RE: [xri-editors] mustUnderstand attribute?

["Drummond Reed" <drummond.reed@cordance.net>]

Since we've already got a proposal for exactly the same thing in the XDI TC,
it makes sense to me to do it here. How could we say we don't anticipate
extensions when we've deliberately made XRI resolution extensible?

=Drummond 

-----Original Message-----
From: Wachob, Gabe [mailto:gwachob@visa.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 11:25 AM
To: Dave McAlpin; xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: RE: [xri-editors] mustUnderstand attribute?

Nothing now, by definition. We've defined all the required semantics now
and compliant processors have to understand everything there is now. 

But I could easily see an example where we added a feature that required
special processing by a resolver or proxy/etc for which a failure should
be generated if such processing could not be accomodated. For example,
maybe there are policy statements (as extension elements in the XRID)
about how often an authority should be contacted (not more than once a
minute, for example) - and if you as a resolver don't understand that
policy statement, then you shouldn't even attempt to use the XRID and
should just throw up your hands and fail. 

For me, this is a judgement call - nothing will break today if we don't
have it - I'm just trying to anticipate extensions, etc that might come
back to bite us if we don't have a way of making them explicit. 

I'd be curious to hear other opinions. If this is something others don't
see a need for, then we can probably pass. If people are designing
extensions with mandatory behaviors, they'll just have to find other
mechanisms to induce failure by resolvers if they resolvers don't
understand the extensions that require the mandatory new behavior. 

And of course, you may rightly believe that we'll never have such
extensions, or that we should strongly discourage them. I'd be open to
those opinions as well. 

	-Gabe

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave McAlpin [mailto:Dave.McAlpin@epok.net] 
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 11:05 AM
> To: Wachob, Gabe; xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: RE: [xri-editors] mustUnderstand attribute?
> 
> I don't see the use case. What's an example of additional data in an
> XRID that _must_ be processed by the client?
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wachob, Gabe [mailto:gwachob@visa.com] 
> Sent: Thursday, January 27, 2005 9:54 AM
> To: xri-editors@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: [xri-editors] mustUnderstand attribute?
> 
> Folks often talk about a mustUnderstand attribute as a way of
> controlling the use of extension elements in processing models
> surrounding XML documents.
> 
> The idea is that a simple processor is allowed to ignore all 
> elements it
> doesn't understand unless an element has a mustUnderstand="true"
> attribute. In this case, the processor, if it doesn't understand the
> element, must throw up its hands and give up. This allows an extension
> author to create an extension that MUST be processed for correct
> functionality. Useful for security features, for example.
> 
> Do we want to put something like this in XRI? Seems like it's 
> a good way
> to future-proof current implementations and prevent breakage and
> headache down the road...
> 
> 	-Gabe
> 
>  
> __________________________________________________ 
> gwachob@visa.com
> Chief Systems Architect
> Technology Strategies and Standards
> Visa International 
> Phone: +1.650.432.3696   Fax: +1.650.554.6817
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