Re: Proposed issue; Visibility of Web services

The problem with the proposed issue is that it is restating the obvious:
WSA takes the position that there is a trade-off between genericity and
programmable interfaces, and there are ways of regaining some of the
lost visibility of the former by providing more self-descriptive
syntaxes for the latter.

This does not mean that both "have" visiblity or that one has visibility
and the other does not.  Visibility is a scalar property -- one design
will have more or less than another.  The open question is whether a
self-descriptive syntax that depends on non-standard interfaces by
reference will have enough visibility to satisfy the firewall admins.

We don't know the answer to that question.  WSA has been explicitly
chartered to explore that design space.  It is therefore not an issue
for the TAG to decide by fiat.  The TAG has simply required that WSA
do no harm to the visibility of the existing Web, meaning that the
WSA messages sent through HTTP must obey HTTP's message semantics.


Cheers,

Roy T. Fielding, Chief Scientist, Day Software
                  2 Corporate Plaza, Suite 150
                  Newport Beach, CA 92660-7929   fax:+1.949.644.5064
                  (roy.fielding@day.com) <http://www.day.com/>

                  Co-founder, The Apache Software Foundation
                  (fielding@apache.org)  <http://www.apache.org/>

Received on Wednesday, 16 July 2003 10:50:01 UTC