New York May 30, 2001 PureEdge Solutions, a provider of transaction security products and services, has announced it will support the Canonical XML 1.0 Recommendation produced by the World Wide Web (W3C) Consortium.
Recommendation status means the specification, authored and edited by PureEdge senior product architect John Boyer and produced by the joint IETF/W3C XML Signature Working Group, is now as firm a standard as HTML or XML itself.
Canonical XML provides a means for verifying the integrity of a digitally signed document in cases where incidental changes to the document have been introduced by XML software. This public standard ensures that integrity of the document will not be damaged when processed by XML applications.
"The value of a business record rests on its authenticity as well as its content," said PureEdge CTO David Manning. "A digital document is of little value without a means to prove its authenticity. This standard means an organization does not have to sacrifice the proof intrinsic to digitally signed documents in order to use them in real-world e-commerce applications."
Boyer is also an author of the XML-Signature Syntax and Processing specification, which describes how XML signatures provide integrity, message authentication and/or signer authentication. Prior to the XML Signature Working Group's inception, PureEdge participated at the W3C's April 1999 Signed XML Workshop, presenting the extensible forms description language (XFDL). Co-authored in 1998 by PureEdge and Tim Bray, co-editor of the XML 1.0 Specification, XFDL provides an XML-based syntax for digitally signed and legally binding XML agreements, and was published as a W3C Note in 1998.
The Canonical XML specification, XML-Signature Syntax and Processing specification and XFDL specification can all be viewed online.
