Use case for self-destructing XML?

["Costello, Roger L." <costello@mitre.org>]

Hi Folks,

My question is inspired from the Internet Protocol (IP) Time to Live (TTL) header field:

	The Time to Live is an indication of an upper bound on the lifetime of
  	an internet datagram.  It is set by the sender of the datagram and
  	reduced at the points along the route where it is processed.  If the
  	time to live reaches zero before the internet datagram reaches its
  	destination, the internet datagram is destroyed.  The time to live can
  	be thought of as a self-destruct time limit. [1]

Perhaps the data in your XML document is stale (out-of-date) after a certain time? You would like the XML document destroyed (self-destruct) after the time is reached.

Perhaps your XML document is sent to an application which sends it to another application which sends it to another and so forth? You would like to control the number of hops made by the XML by destroying (self-destructing) the XML after N hops.

Other use cases?

Have you put a self-destruct flag in your XML documents?

/Roger

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc791