Subject: [Simple] moving forward on data requirements draft

From: Jonathan Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Sep 2002 16:59:56 -0400

Folks,

I am working on an update to the data-requirements draft:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-rosenberg-simple-data-req-00.txt

I'd like to make a proposal for a change in direction.

Right now, the draft discusses requirements for buddy list manipulation, 
and more or less states that the requirements for authorizations are 
similar. It spends the rest of the doc motivating a framework where 
there is a generic data manipulation requirement, and it tries to 
enumerate those requirements generally.

In Yokohama, this discussion of generalized data manipulation led us to 
a discussion on the relationship to protocols in this area, such as 
SyncML, acap, XPath (for naming components of a data object), and so on.

Having thought about this some more, I think that this discussion of 
generic data manipulation confuses requirements with solution. The use 
of a general data manipulation protocol, like acap or syncml, is a 
potential solution. We are best spending our time enumerating 
requirements for the specific problems we have to solve. Thus, I would 
propose dropping the entire generic data manipulation section, and go 
into much more detail on the specifics of the operations we need for 
buddy list manipulation and, more importantly, authorization. Then, when 
evaluating solutions, we can decide on a protocol that does more generic 
data manipulation.

Are people OK with this? I think this will help us quickly wrap up this 
effort so we can get to the protocol selection/design work, which is 
really needed badly.

I will send a separate note on some proposed additions to the 
authorization functions.

-Jonathan R.

-- 
Jonathan D. Rosenberg, Ph.D.                72 Eagle Rock Ave.
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