UWS draft comments

[Mark Taylor]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2014, Paul Harrison wrote:

> > sec 2.2 (2.2.2?):
> >   I would like clarification of whether whitespace is permitted
> >   in text/plain REST endpoints, e.g. {jobs}/(job-id)/phase -
> >   see my email on the grid list:
> >   http://mail.ivoa.net/pipermail/grid/2014-September/002648.html
> >   As far as current practice goes (which you may or may not wish
> >   to endorse), my experience is that most services return exactly
> >   the required string, but the ESAC GACS service appends \r\n to phase.
> 
> I think that the original intent was that there should be no whitespace, however, given that XML responses are basically allowed whitespace freedom, my personal feeling would be to say that the text/plain responses should be equal to the given strings after whitespace stripping.

Fine, but whatever the decision it should be noted explicitly in the text.

> > sec 2.2.1:
> >   last cell in table says "an appropriate identifier as discussed in
> >   in section 3".  It's not really discussed in section 3 (though it
> >   would be nice if it was).
> 
> There was a deliberate policy of devolving as much as possible of this to the SSO document, as it was clear that authentication recommendations would be changing as technology popularities changed - I think that I do not really want to change this policy very much especially on the point of what form the identifier might take. As we discussed at the Interop there could perhaps be an acknowledgement that some other form of identifier (e.g. cookies) that was not strictly an IVOA standard could be used, but I would want to be careful, as there is a danger of making interactions with services confusing if there is some passive (e.g. cookies) as well as active identification/authentication occurring simultaneously. I do agree that this is a matter of some urgency on improving the usability of authentication of IVOA services in general, though I would not want this point to delay a UWS 1.1 unduly though.

Devolving the policy to other standards is fine, but there should be
some change to the current text in this document to make that clear.
For instance either change the text in the table in sec 2.2.1 to something
like "an appropriate identifier whose content is outside the scope of
this standard" or introduce a (short) discussion or placeholder text
with similar intent in section 3.

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/