RE: issue 168 proposal: xsi:type of external references in Encoding

>> In general I don't see why references are different from any other 
>> piece of data in SOAP. We don't guarantee that data is within bounds 
>> or make sense in any way so why should we do that for references? A
>> feature may
>> provide services that involve references and of course they have to
be
>> used properly in order to be useful to the receiving application but
>> isn't this the case for all other data too?
>>
>
>The issue is that references are often a special data type 
>that applications would often like resolved/dereferenced for 
>their application.  An application developer does not want the 
>hassle of the "stitching together" or retrieval process 
>exposed to them.
>  The problem - and you address this - is that 
>doing a general purpose reference 
>typing/encoding/de-referencing does not appear to be possible. 

Yes, where the Web provides a general purpose referencing it does not
guarantee anything about the dereferencability of references. IMO, this
is an inherent property of any very large distributed system. This
doesn't mean that I can't sit down and make my own collection of links
that all are completely internally consistent and have that set live in
the bigger set.

> I understand people's motivations - I had them myself at one 
>point - but IMHO there is no easy/reasonable/useful thing to 
>do given our schedule.

I agree and on a slightly more serious note, I would from a general Web
architecture point of view suggest that we not go down this particular
slippery slope.

Henrik