precise meaning of an anonymous destination in a request message

An which arose during the construction of test cases for the CR testing of the SOAP
binding and Core documents, was the precise meaning of an anonymous [destination] 
property in a 'request' message.

The example messages in the Test Suite are designed to be as minimal as
possible. As a result many of the initial messages in an exchange lacked the
wsa:To SOAP header meaning the [destination] property value is 'anonymous'.

This is where the trouble starts: when writing the test cases, I assumed that
'anonymous' would default to the endpoint the message was HTTP POST'ed to, 
whereas others have read and implemented the spec differently. Mike has an
excellent rollup of Microsoft's understanding of this issue:

http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-ws-addressing-tests/2006Jan/0027.html

Empirically the specifications either lack clarity or are ambiguous in this
area.

Paul

// I sent something along these lines last night, but it seems to be
lost from the archive and my outbox, so apologies if this turns up
twice in slightly different flavours.//

Received on Friday, 20 January 2006 16:13:01 UTC