enveloping, batching, signing

[Steve Allen]

On Mon 2008-02-04T12:12:50 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ:
> We have to support both.  Can the envelope also be made lightweight
> for the single packet case?

Quite literally the hardest part of making the envelope is
agreeing upon what to name the envelope document type.
Other than that it need merely allow one or more VOEvent
elements and zero or more Signature elements.

This doesn't answer the question of whether it makes sense to
allow Signature inside the VOEvent.

> This seems reasonable.  Note that this sort of envelope need not
> actually encapsulate the VOEvent packet.  In fact, we should embed the
> signature in an entirely separate follow-up packet since a document
> and its signature can travel separately.

*May* travel separately and *should* are very different things, for
separate travel places extra requirements on the handling systems in
order to maintain and allow access to their association, and to
distinguish followups which are events from followups which are
signatures.

These are some of the serious questions of engineering for which
we will wish to agree on answers:

Is a Signature important enough warrant inclusion in every event?
Is a Signature cheap enough (creation, transmission, validation, or
even just ignoring) to allow inclusion in every event?
Are there any use cases which want enveloped batches of events?

--
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