- From: Savas Parastatidis <Savas.Parastatidis@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2004 19:15:23 -0000
- To: <public-ws-addressing@w3.org>
Hi Dave, [snip] > I agree that there are cases where in a mandatory action will result in > garbage being filled in. Same way as mandatory zip codes get filled in > with a "11111" by me as a resident of Canada. > > I can now imagine some viewers thoughts "Aha! See, you just proved my > point about mandatory fields resulting in garbage. How could you be so > foolish?!" > > There is a trade-off to be made. Any mandatory fields may result in > garbage. Any optional fields may result in no data or even garbage. > The trade-off is around certainty of the field with possibility of > garbage versus lack of certainty of the field and still possibility of > garbage. > [snip] I think this is a very good analysis! Thanks. However, I believe that your analogy between wsa:action and the mandatory ZIP code field on a web page has a very small flaw. In the case of a ZIP code the semantics are clear. It's a zip code. If one chooses to input 11111, that's their choice. The service provider will check the validity of the data since the semantics of the field and its acceptable values are well known. What are the semantics of a wsa:action information header when its value is not garbage? How could one determine by just looking at the wsa:action header whether its value is garbage or not? Of course one could define that the semantics of wsa:action are protocol specific and the accepted values (not format of those values, since we know it's going to be a URI) are not known. It's an open set. So what does it mean to have urn:process:message vs http://bla.bla/call/this/method? Of course we need separate specifications to define the semantics of the _values_ inside a was:action information header but what about wsa:action itself? Regards, -- Savas Parastatidis http://savas.parastatidis.name
Received on Friday, 5 November 2004 21:27:50 UTC