Re: [WhenToUseGet-7] Re: TAG document: SOAP HTTP GET binding available

All,

I wanted to restate (and clarify) some earlier comments that I haven't
seen taken into account in this discussion[1]; SOAP is intended to be
bound to a protocol, not to a method of a protocol.

DavidO's proposal[2] is insufficient, IMO, because it is a binding to a
method, not a protocol.  It could easily be made a protocol binding, but
it would need to say when the GET method should be used versus the POST
method.  IMHO, that is the single most important thing that needs to be
said here, and I haven't heard it discussed yet.

Alternately, I believe that we (XMLP WG and the TAG) should be able to
avoid defining a binding that uses GET, and instead just say this
somewhere;

  "A Web service MAY support GET, and if it does, it SHOULD return
   a representation of the state of that service when invoked."

Or more generally, as Roy said[3];

  "It is impossible to conform to an application-level protocol without
   also conforming faithfully to its message semantics."

which could be restated in spec-speak as;

  "A Web service SHOULD NOT use an HTTP method to mean something other
   than that defined in RFC 2616."

 [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002May/0024
 [2] http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/ws-uri.html
 [3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/0303

Thanks.

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, CTO, Idokorro Mobile (formerly Planetfred)
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.               distobj@acm.org
http://www.markbaker.ca        http://www.idokorro.com

Received on Thursday, 16 May 2002 11:43:36 UTC