RE: Caveats for Web-friendly service description

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-web-http-desc-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-web-http-desc-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Philippe Le Hegaret
> Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2005 12:43 PM
> To: Leigh Dodds
> Cc: public-web-http-desc@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Caveats for Web-friendly service description
> 
> On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 20:21 +0100, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> > Tim Bray wrote:
> > > On Jun 1, 2005, at 7:48 AM, Leigh Dodds wrote:
> > >
> > >> Can I suggest that a requirement for a service description format
> > >> ought to allow for both RDF and XML as representation formats?
> > >
> > > Why?  The cost of supporting two completely incompatible
> representation
> > > formats is high, so the corresponding benefit would  have to be
high
> > > too. -Tim
> >
> >  From the opening list message [1]: "this mailing list is dedicated
to
> > discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP,
and
> > aligned with the Web and REST Architecture."
> >
> > This is inclusive of all REST style services no matter what kind of
> > representations they return.
> 
> Correct, but note that it's about languages in general, i.e. it does
not
> preclude to have only one. I would agree with Tim here and be worried
> about the cost of trying to do so. We already excluded SOAP messages
for
> example.

I don't think we've precluded SOAP.  I don't see any proposal so far
that precludes saying that an HTTP POST input is-a soap envelope and the
response is-a soap envelope.  Much of WSDL's focus is describing the
content of a soap envelope, which seems out of scope for what we are
interested in.  

FWIW, if XML Schema had better support for describing soap envelopes, ie
take a soap envelope and restrict the body to contain a particular
element, then a new service description language could even describe
SOAP services.  I looked at RelaxNG to do this, but I *think* the lack
of type support means it suffers from the same problem.  

I think that probably the most important decision is whether the focus
is on describing XML based resources or MIME based resources.  I'm
mostly concerned about describing XML, and I'm less concerned about
describing PNG resources.  I think the power of automation is with XML.

Cheers,
Dave

Received on Thursday, 2 June 2005 15:40:25 UTC