OASIS Open

Thales e-Security

Template Proposal - Tim Hudson

After digging through templates as they currently stand and the two proposals, I am still not sure we have any real world use cases for them that cannot be handled by other existing objects and their individual attributes as a better defined solution.

I am also concerned that if we allow different behaviors of objects without clearly specifying two separate object classes, we will end up with a lot of "discussions" on how existing or new objects behave or can be modified and I would rather avoid this unless we can clearly define two or more object classes first to address the mutable versus immutable objects.

Lastly by not clarifying section 2.2.6 on templates as fully as possible in the long run (which is not part of this poll), it will require additional work on the part of any group or organization that want to define their own profiles and make use of templates. This in turn will make providing support for the potential numerous different usages of templates harder for server vendors who want to support a large number of profiles.

Without proper use cases for templates showing why they should be handled differently I must go with the minimize the options of use and remove any extraneous content until we can address the real reasons for their use and then more fully define them properly.