Subject: Signature Targets

From: Justin Richer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2021 11:14:30 -0500

Bikeshed time!

In the signatures draft, we’ve got a notion of message component identifiers applying to different kinds of messages. The simple ones are requests and responses, but there’s also a notion of “a response to a specific request” that allows applications of signatures to tie together multiple messages. Say for example you send a request as a POST, the response can sign “@method” with “POST” as its value, and because it’s coming in a response it’s understood / signaled that it doesn’t apply to the response itself, but to the request that the response is responding to.

The question we have is what is the right term for this kind of message? We are currently using “Related-Response”, and whatever we decide on we’ll be able to define it clearly, with examples. Is there an existing term for this? I wasn’t able to find something specific in the Semantics draft to reference. I know it’s a little weird because all responses are, by definition, related to a request, but this is really meant to be a slightly different class.

 — Justin