RE: Revisiting WSDL Compontent Designators

+1

4) [at the end] is questionable though. Isn't targetNamespace supposed to define 'where' the WSDL components are defined (belong to)? It was also supposed to identify semantics of the described thingies. I don't think that XML Schema recommends that schema document itself is available at the targetNamespace.


-- Igor Sedukhin .. (igor.sedukhin@ca.com)
-- (631) 342-4325 .. 1 CA Plaza, Islandia, NY 11788

-----Original Message-----
From: www-ws-desc-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-desc-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Jonathan Marsh
Sent: Tuesday, November 11, 2003 2:54 PM
To: www-ws-desc@w3.org
Subject: Revisiting WSDL Compontent Designators


I'm reviewing the draft TAG finding at
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/abstractComponentRefs-20031030.  Here are some thoughts:

1) The finding states that using a namespace name for the base of the identifier is OK (although it does not unambiguously recommend this
practice.)

2) The finding states that instances of the description language should be available by de-referencing the identifier - this implies that WSDL should recommend that a WSDL document be available at the targetNamespace URI and that the WSDL media type registration include the fragment syntax we agree on.

3) The finding communicates the feeling that some TAG members have that an XPointer-compatible syntax not be used.  Following the minutes of the discussion, this appears to be motivated by a belief that unescaped parentheses are not allowed in fragments.  But from
http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt:

      fragment      = *uric
      uric          = reserved | unreserved | escaped
      unreserved    = alphanum | mark
      mark          = "-" | "_" | "." | "!" | "~" | "*" | "'" |
                      "(" | ")"

Which clearly shows that parens are allowed (and not even reserved).  I conclude that this is just a momentary lapse that the TAG will rectify soon.  I think our XPointer-compatible syntax is good.

I also notice that certain names may not be expressible in "alphanum"
and so we may need to require %-escaping of some characters (assuming we want a single URI- (not IRI-) compatible string as an identifier.


Proposal

I therefore propose that we adopt the TAG finding (except for the missing parens):

1) Reintroduce WSDL component designators as an appendix in our specification (see http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-wsdl12-20030611/#wsdl-uri-references),
cleaning up the text to remove the issues and rationale and instead just present our solution.

2) Add a clause to the appendix providing a rule for escaping characters in component names not allowed in URIs (e.g. name characters other than alphanum must be %-escaped using UTF-8 byte values).

3) Reintroduce these fragment identifiers as a normative part of the media-type registration.

4) Add a statement recommending to authors to make WSDL available at the targetNamespace.

Received on Thursday, 13 November 2003 11:29:05 UTC