RE: [xml-dev] The Rule of Least Power - does it miss the point?

["Bullard, Claude L \(Len\)" <len.bullard@intergraph.com>]

True for the global network.  False for particular 
information flowing at particular times in particular 
contexts.  Hence, the concept of legitimacy.  You 
really do want to have the ability to control the 
indexability of your Social Security Number.

I recently had my identity stolen.  Because I don't know how that 
happened, I can only undo the damage.  But the lesson is 
that unconstrainable use of a global identifier in a 
system that is quick to grant privileges and slow to 
revoke them is a bad thing.  SSNs worked in the days when 
getting a phone or a credit privilege took effort and 
mostly human reviews.  Today it is fast but the checking 
is gutted and the time to detection is slow.  If one 
makes a rule that data should be maximally indexable 
without respect to context and legitimacy, one builds 
exactly the kind of dangerous system we have today in 
the World Wide Web:  witless (not dumb, just witless).

Being able to spoof an Emergency Management System 
using callerID is a bad thing.

Another way to think about this:  if data is marked 
correctly with regards as to operations that can 
be performed on it, then the object can acquire 
rights from the governing environment or have them 
revoked.  The reason for a Pragmatic Layer is to 
make the system aware of concepts such as legitimacy 
which are situation or context rights over data. 
But the idea that information should be coded for 
maximum indexability proves to be witless.

BTW:  This thread and the thread Jeliffe is chatting 
regards schemas are overlapping.  It may be the case 
that pure XML message instancing is flawed (no rules).

NOTE:  Given humans that record your SSN on purchase, 
and that they are often low paid are subject to 
temptations to harvest and resell (same problem 
as payola and the under paid program director 
for radio stations), the time has come to do 
away with SSNs as unique IDs for other transactions.

len


From: Gavin Thomas Nicol [mailto:gtn@rbii.com]

> Information is transported subjective;y (least
> power, least authority) and objectified for
> local processing.

That's the key point, but this has always been so whenever  
information is exchanged.

My guess is that the authors are simply saying that wherever  
possible, encode data in a form that is amenable to automated  
analysis and transformation. That's common sense IMHO.