RE: Web Service Definition [Was "Some Thoughts ..."]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Krishna Sankar [mailto:ksankar@cisco.com]
> Sent: Monday, March 04, 2002 3:00 PM
> To: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Web Service Definition [Was "Some Thoughts ..."]
> 

> 	I had responded to the message.

Yes, and you posed some questions that I didn't answer!

>	1.	Are we restricting web services to XML on the wire or just
> Internet-protocols and marshalling ?

I think XML provides various (SOAP, WSDL, Schemas, XForms etc.)  good means
to the end of an explicit, programmer-friendly "contract" describing the
invocation and result.

>	2.	If Yes (i.e. only XML) what about XHTML ?

I would say "yes" -- as one can do a lot with the DIV and SPAN tags along
with the class attribute to disambiguate HTML for programmers while still
making it look good to humans.  Of course you need to *document* the
conventions used.  I don't know that we want to encourage that in the
Reference Architecture, but the definition can't exclude it.

>	3.	If yes, what about a browser which translates XML to HTML
and after
> getting the input from a human sends back an XML ?

Like XForms?  I think (offhand, without considering it thoroughly) that our
definition and reference architecture should cover the case of a program
generating an XForms message to invoke a "web service" even though a human
could do the same thing, and the "web service" wouldn't know whether a
program or a human filled out the form.

Received on Monday, 4 March 2002 15:19:20 UTC