Re: AFTF requirements, post-2003/02/03 telcon

At 03:20 PM 2/3/2003 -0500, Mark Jones wrote:

>R29. [This requirement engendered a lot of discussion and has
>       some significant ramifications for the Abstract Attachment
>       Specification and for the basic conception of the SOAP
>       message infoset.]
>
>   (a) A message with all its parts, however separated physically, must
>       be representable as a single infoset.
>
>   (b) A message with all its parts, however separated physically, must
>       be describable as a single XML element in an XML schema.

I don't know what is motivating this requirement but let me just point
out that this attachment specification is needed precisely to complement
XML, to make up for its intrinsic shortcomings.  Specifically, a hierarchical
data model with a single root and a brace-matching serialization is a
terrible way to send data.  We need a layer outside of the braces that is
designed to be analyzed incrementally and not top down.  The central
value proposition of XML, layering syntax out of our code, cannot be
applied here because we cannot read the whole package into a parser
before processing it.

(The side-effect of discussing this requirement--pinning down the
definition of terms like "message"--seems like a good thing however.)



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John J. Barton          email:  John_Barton@hpl.hp.com
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Received on Monday, 3 February 2003 17:50:52 UTC