Comments on WS-Internationalization working draft

Here are some comments that I received from an IBM reviewer of the
document.

Chris Ferris' comments:

   There is no normative (or non-normative for that matter) reference to
   SOAP or WSDL. Is there a reason for this? I think that the spec should
   try to provide a binding to both SOAP1.1 (possibly non-normative) and
   SOAP1.2 as well as to both WSDL1.1 and WSDL2.0 so as to be most
   practically useful given that at present, SOAP1.1 is most commonly used
   for interoperability and that WSDL2.0 may endure a rather protracted
   roll-out given its complexity, and also given that MSFT seems
   dis-inclined to target its adoption for Longhorn.
   It references WS-Routing, yet the actual reference in the references
   section is to the W3C WS-Addressing specification. WS-Routing is defunct
   as far as the set of WS-* specs is concerned.
   Secondly, there seems only to be a mapping to WSDL2.0 features and
   properties. IBM (amongst others) doesn't support the F&P aspect of
   WSDL2.0 [2]. Basically, it directly competes with WS-Policy.
   IMO, the spec should be leveraging the SOAP1.2 soap:relay attribute [3]
   and should use the http://www.w3.org/2003/05/soap-envelope/role/next
   role for i18n processing to achieve the desired effect (or so I would
   imagine) of having all processing on the message be performed using the
   desired locale. At the very least, this should probably be recommended
   by the spec.
   I'm a little concerned about the use of the "$" for certain of the
   values e.g. <locale>$default</locale>. My concern is that with certain
   scripting environments such as PHP, that it may be confused with
   variable substitution and will require escaping. I guess I don't
   understand why the value space for the locale isn't a URI.
   I think the spec needs a little more specificity with regards to the
   content model of the <i18n:international> element. Specifically, it
   should be described using XML Schema (IMO) and also should probably be
   described in terms of the infoset... similar to the way that SOAP's
   elements and attributes are defined in the SOAP1.2 spec.



------------------------------------------------
Mary K. Trumble
Tel: (512) 838-0094; T/L 678-0094
mtrumble@us.ibm.com

Received on Monday, 26 September 2005 06:28:44 UTC