[CAP] Restricted INFO blocks (was Fwd: Re: CAP 1.2?)

[matt hoffman]

Thanks for forwarding that, Art.  It's great to hear from the Canadian
implementors on this.

Art Botterell wrote:
> Forwarded on behalf of Doug Alport:
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Allport [mailto:Doug at AllportGroup.com]
> Sent: October 23, 2007 1:52 PM
> To: 'cap-list at lists.incident.com'
> Subject: RE: [CAP] CAP 1.2?
> ...
> If there is a 2.0, we have compiled a list of suggestions:
>
> 1.	Multiple <info> segment use be limited to the purpose of supporting
> additional languages.
I strongly support this addition.  From the software engineering point
of view, it's very unclear how to handle an alert with multiple
unrelated info elements (can we break the info elements into multiple
alerts?  Must we send the whole alert to subscribers who are only
interested in one info element?).  We also end up with users who treat
the alert and info elements as analogous to the RSS "channel" and
"item", which is not the intent.

I know it was mentioned here very recently that being able to package
different related alerts together under one "alert" umbrella was useful,
but I wonder whether that is deciding something that is in the
subscribers' and alert systems' domain.  If two alerts are clearly
related, perhaps reference tags would be appropriate. 

However, I tend to come to this from the implementation point of view,
so if there are operational reasons to keep the info element fluid, I'm
happy to hear it.