RE: Summing up on visibility(?)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Walden Mathews [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: Thursday, January 09, 2003 10:24 PM
> To: Champion, Mike; [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Summing up on visibility(?)
> 
 
> In order to perform a security function, wouldn't it have to 
> "understand"
> more than XML and SOAP syntax, though?  How would it arrive at that
> (higher) level of understanding?

Beats me, I'm not in the firewall business. Those who are in the firewall
business seem to be frantically building products that claim to do useful
things by parsing the XML, understanding the SOAP processing model, and
letting the customer define security rules based on this stuff. If you're
right, I guess they'll fail.  We shall see. 

But once again, I'm not clear on what you're asking the WSA WG to do.  Mark
raises the "visibility" issue periodically as a principle that should
somehow be respected, and it appears that most of us don't get the point.
To the limited extent that I understand what you're getting at here, it
seems to me that XML supports "visibility" because 3rd party tools,
intermediaries, etc. can extract useful information for routing, cacheing,
security, etc. without truly "understanding" what's going on.  That's the
same kind of advance that HTTP offered over raw IP messages as far as these
things were concerned.  Time marches on.