Subject: [Simple] Comment to draft-olson-simple-publish-01.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 10:11:49 +0200

Hi,

Thanks for the new version. Here are some concerns/comments:

- Sections 1.1.5 and 3.4: Facet header
I am bit confused how this is indented to work. If each PUA always publishes full state then how is it really possible to use facet header to indicate to which watcher instances published information is targeted to? As it is currently defined one PUA could only publish all its information to one or multiple facets i.e. it is not possible to give some part of that info so some facets and some other parts to other facet. In current case it is all or nothing. I would see that better approach would be to include this kind of information into published content and to authorization rules but not to publish protocol itself.
Also it is completely unspecified what should happen if PA does not support the requested facet. Should it report an error or should there be some default behavior. Building interoperable system in my mind requires that these procedures are defined.

- Document does not specify any error handling mechanism for publish. I think there can be cases where either PA or compositor does not for some reason understand what PUA has published or that compositor for some reason cannot add published data into some existing data. Without any error reporting mechanism is might very hard for PUAs to know what went wrong and what PUA could do to correct its actions.

- Section 1.1.3 and examples
Document states that it is possible to associate Class to tuple-ids. This is also used in examples. As draft-ietf-impp-cpim-pidf-05.txt currently stands this is not allowed. I don't know if this is going to change in future versions of PIDF but at a moment associating any semantics to tuple-ids is forbidden.

Best Regards
- Mikko

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From: Jonathan Rosenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 00:16:44 -0500

Well, we are going to discuss in person tomorrow, but may as well do 
this on the list too.

inline.

[email-masked] wrote:
 > - Sections 1.1.5 and 3.4: Facet header I am bit confused how this is
 > indented to work. If each PUA always publishes full state then how is
 > it really possible to use facet header to indicate to which watcher
 > instances published information is targeted to? As it is currently
 > defined one PUA could only publish all its information to one or
 > multiple facets i.e. it is not possible to give some part of that
 > info so some facets and some other parts to other facet. In current
 > case it is all or nothing. I would see that better approach would be
 > to include this kind of information into published content and to
 > authorization rules but not to publish protocol itself. Also it is
 > completely unspecified what should happen if PA does not support the
 > requested facet. Should it report an error or should there be some
 > default behavior. Building interoperable system in my mind requires
 > that these procedures are defined.

It is actually my preference that we remove the Facet header entirely. I 
would like to keep separate the problems of publication from the policy 
mechanisms described in draft-ietf-simple-data-req. Those mechanisms 
allow a user to specify rules about what information various subscribers 
should receive. This overlaps with what the Facet header is providing, 
by allowing that information to be provided at publication time. Rather 
that having two ways of doing the same thing, we should pick one.

I'd prefer to keep this within the policy mechanism since policy is much 
broader. The policy mechanisms will allow me to specify who sees which 
documents, but also WHEN they will see them, whether they will be 
encrypted, and so on. None of that is possible through the Facet 
mechanism. So, I'd prefer to use a single broader mechanism.

-Jonathan R.

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