Re: Caveats for Web-friendly service description

Marc Hadley wrote:

> Paul Downey and I discussed this over a few beers last night. I think  
> there's a tension between providing a loose description that is more  
> open to evolution but less useful in terms of code generation and a  
> description that is tighter but more useful for code generation. WADL  
> parameters are a nod in this direction, if the representation is  
> relatively simple and the description includes parameters then the  
> schema can be ignored when processing a received representation (you  
> just apply the XPaths and grab the information you're interested in).

re: XPaths. You're assuming that the web service returns XML, rather
than, say, RDF. In the latter case XPaths aren't much use unless you're
working with a constrained RDF/XML syntax.

Can I suggest that a requirement for a service description format
ought to allow for both RDF and XML as representation formats?

(Whether the description format itself should be RDF is a different
issue).

Cheers,

L.
--
http://www.ldodds.com/blog