Re: Question re: XML embedding in XML-dist protocols

I believe that WebDAV (RFC 2518) lets you associate properties with a
resource where the properties are simple name/value pairs. While property
values are usually simple character strings, the specification allows for
these values to be expressed in XML with the restriction that it be
well-formed. This allows you to use arbitrary XML property values within
WebDAV (which is an XML-based protocol) without causing any kind of
conflict.

Kaushik


----- Original Message -----
> One of the attractions to me in using an XML-based protocol is that it
> should be easy to exchange information already encoded in XML. For
> example, as part of a command I might like to be able to pass a block of
> metadata encoded in RDF, or a signed assertion encoded using
> XMLSignature, or an embedded web document fragment in raw XML. To be
> clear, I'm not talking about just sending such an XML packet over HTTP
> (an easy job) I'd like the packet to be one of a number of parameters to
> a service and to use some RPC mechanism to encode the other parameters.
>
> The protocols I've looked at so far (XML-RPC, SOAP 1.0 and 1.1) provide
> serialization algorithms for conveying standard datatypes over XML. They
> don't seem to include any hooks for including a datatype to represent an
> embedded XML node tree which I could include within the payload. Soap
> 1.1 would *allow* me to define such a thing by using the encodingStyle
> attribute but doesn't seem to have such a thing out of the box. I guess
> I'm looking for an <embedded-xml> element which would prevent the
> deserialization algorithm descending further and would expose the XML
> sub-tree to the client/server as a DOM (or DOM2, or jdom or whatever)
> node for further parsing.
>
> So:
> 1. Is this a reasonable sort of requirement? Am I just unusual in even
> trying to do this!
> 2. Is there some capability along these lines already available or
> planned?
>
> Dave Reynolds
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Received on Tuesday, 9 May 2000 01:58:45 UTC