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Title Policy assertion semantics independent of attachment mechanism Description A policy can be attached to a policy subject as external attachment, directly included, or referenced by the policy subject. The assertions contained in the attached policy maintain their semantics independent of the chosen attachment mechanism. The guidelines should make that explicit. Justification Assertion authors are constrained from designing assertions that change their semantics based on the attachment mechanism. Policy tools must have the liberty to choose the most appropriate or feasible attachment mechanism at any time without having to analyze the contents of the attached policy. Target Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors Proposal Include in the Guidelines section 4.1: WS-PolicyAttachment provides various mechanisms to attach a policy to a policy subject. Independent of the employed attachment mechanism, constraints may be defined to which policy subject an assertion may be attached [Web Services Policy Framework, section 3.4]. The semantics of a policy assertion may not depend on the mechanism by which a policy is attached to a policy subject. This allows policy tools to choose the most appropriate mechanism to attach a policy without having to analyze the contents of the policy.
We modified the proposal and rephrased the sentence on constraining attachment to policy subjects. We hope this makes the text easier to understand. Title Policy assertion semantics independent of attachment mechanism Description A policy can be attached to a policy subject as external attachment, directly included, or referenced by the policy subject. The assertions contained in the attached policy maintain their semantics independent of the chosen attachment mechanism. The guidelines should make that explicit. Justification Assertion authors are constrained from designing assertions that change their semantics based on the attachment mechanism. Policy tools must have the liberty to choose the most appropriate or feasible attachment mechanism at any time without having to analyze the contents of the attached policy. Target Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors Proposal Include in the Guidelines section 4.1: WS-PolicyAttachment provides various mechanisms to attach a policy to a policy subject. Although a policy assertion may be tailored for a specific set of policy subjects by design, its semantics do not depend on the mechanism by which a policy is attached to a policy subject. Independence from a specific attachment mechanism allows policy tools to choose the most appropriate mechanism to attach a policy without having to analyze the contents of the policy.
RESOLUTION: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4198 closed with proposal in http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=4198#c1 as amanded by Chris here: "Although a policy assertion may be tailored for or constrained to a specific set of policy subjects by design, its semantics are not dependent upon the mechanism by which a policy expression is attached to a given policy... <fsasaki> ...subject. For instance, an assertion "Foo" has the same semantic when attached to a WSDL1.1 operation regardless of whether it was attached using XML element policy attachment or the external URI attachment mechanism." http://www.w3.org/2007/01/17-ws-policy-irc#T20-02-11 Note, the amendment merely changes one sentence and adds another to the original proposal.