By "MAY", all I meant was that "We won't insist that the client compare the values against each other." After all, a client might just print them, as I think the bake-off clients did.
s/MAY/may/ :-) - Wendy Roome From: "Y. Richard Yang" <[email protected]> Date: Fri, May 17, 2013 15:42 To: Wendy Roome <[email protected]> Cc: IETF ALTO <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [alto] Equivalence of various identifiers from an ALTO Server > A > client MAY compare one ordinal value against another ordinal in the same > response, but that's all. Why add a MAY? The current wording (Sec. 6.2) is "If the Cost Mode is 'ordinal', the Path Cost of each communicating pair is relative to the m*n entries." In other words, a response returns m*n entries, where each entry is a number (ranking). The current spec does not specify that the m*n numbers are distinct, and hence the response may contain entries with the same value. Consider an example of two two sources (S1, S2) and three destinations (D1, D2, D3), and a response as the following: S1 -> D1: 1 S1 -> D2: 2 S1 -> D3: 2 S2 -> D1: 1 S2 -> D2: 2 S2 -> D3: 3 The interpretation is (~ means equivalent): S1 -> D1 ~ S2 -> D1 < S1 -> D2 ~ S1 -> D3 ~ S2 -> D2 < S2 -> D3 In other words, it defines a partial ordering. Is this what you are referring to in terms of MAY? Richard
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