RE: baseline CPIM security

At 08:57 PM 10/3/2002 -0400, Peterson, Jon wrote:
>There are various degrees of interoperability that we might encourage
>through CPIM - but clearly there would be no need for MSGFMT or the DateTime
>RFC or PIDF if our intention wasn't that CPIM-compliant protocols would use
>these common objects.

a gateway specification needs a canonical form.  indeed, gateways that are 
designed for extensibility usually implement a canonical internal form and 
then map to and from it.

that was the intent behind the original effort on CPIM, as I understood it 
at the time.  the larger and longer-term likelihood of propagating change 
out to the participating systems was thought to be just 
that.  likelihood.  not requirement.

anything that is imposed as a change to a participating system -- such as a 
requirement that can only be satisfied by the direct cooperation of the 
originator or the recipient system -- ensures that CPIM can have 
essentially no utility as a gateway mechanism and must, instead, be 
strictly competitive with existing IM services.

Competition was explicitly not the goal.  Interconnect was the goal.  I 
guess that has changed.


>Gateways have no use for something like PIDF

see the above observation about the role of canonical form in a gateway.


>  - PIDF is
>designed to be tunneled through gateways. Now we're merely discussing the
>addition of security properties to these tunneled objects that we've already

"merely discussing the addition" is what is called a slippery slope, and 
this working group has slipped down it quite a distance.

take a look at the timeline of this working group.  there is no "merely" 
for anything that is added.

d/

----------
Dave Crocker <mailto:[email protected]>
TribalWise, Inc. <http://www.tribalwise.com>
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