- From: Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- Date: Sun, 7 Apr 2002 10:45:30 -0700
- To: <www-tag@w3.org>
In reference to a link to my email message > Larry Masinter talked about the problems of reusing port 80 in > http://discuss.develop.com/archives/wa.exe?A2=ind0004&L=soap&O=D&P=24041 Michael Brennan wrote: > I've heard some reasonable critiques of SOAP, but this one has me at a > complete loss. Indeed, the argument advanced seems to fly in the face of > REST. I'd love to hear someone explain or defend this. So I will defend myself: The purpose of standards making -- the reason why there's a W3C and IETF and people pay money to join or fly to meetings -- is because the value of the Internet and the Web comes from the fact that they actually work -- you really can find out about movies or order clothes on the web. While we're constructing useful theories to explain how the web works (like REST) as a way of understanding how to extend the web to work in new ways (like XML protocol), we shouldn't abandon the practical value of making sure the standards we design will also operate correctly in the real world. "This is the first time I've seen an argument advanced that using port 80 for anything other than "HTTP-for-web-browsing" is abuse of HTTP" I didn't say that SOAP over port 80 was an abuse. I think transparent interception proxies are an abuse. I said SOAP over port 80 wouldn't work well in the face of such abuse. "...defending the notion that proxies can blithely alter document content " I'm not defending the notion, I think it's an abomination. I'm just opposed to designing and promoting standards that don't work well because others are doing things that you don't think they should do. Reductio ad absurdum: Would you'd leave security out of protocol design, because you don't want to support people stealing or eavesdropping? Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Sunday, 7 April 2002 13:46:41 UTC