HTTP binding: Use of HTTP accept headers

Part 2's section 6.3 Default Binding Rules states:

     * Accept headers. Standard HTTP accept headers (see section 14 of [IETF
       RFC 2616]) MAY be used in an HTTP request. When constructing an HTTP
       Accept header, the HTTP client MAY take into account the
       expectedMediaType information (see [MTXML]) appearing on an output
       message description to find out about the type of binary element
       content which is expected to be sent by the HTTP server.

This hints that expectedMediaType may contain a list of media types
that may be used in an HTTP response.

However, we have defined an {http output serialization} property which
declares the one media type which is being used in the HTTP response.

So how does expectedMediaType come into play here? Do Accept headers
really do anything useful?

This needs to be clarified.

For background information, see the thread starting at [1].

Should we keep the text above, "appearing on an output message
description" needs to be crisply expressed in terms of components and
properties.

  1. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-desc/2005Aug/0010.html
-- 
Hugo Haas - W3C
mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/