Re: Is This a Web Service?

MessageMike,

I disagree about the "how to construct the URL" part -- that's brittle at best.  The
handling of forms should be considered in the set of "generic web protocols".   And I'm
not clear on your requirements about the format.  Are you saying that if the service
just says "responses are in XHTML" that would be good enough?

Anyway, Anne's proposal was only a SHOULD w.r.t. interface description at that
level, and so if that's valid, then going without should also work.  Just testing the
[pond] waters...

Walden


----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Champion, Mike 
  To: Www-Ws-Arch@W3. Org 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 1:25 PM
  Subject: RE: Is This a Web Service?



    -----Original Message-----
    From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net]
    Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 1:16 PM
    To: Anne Thomas Manes; Www-Ws-Arch@W3. Org
    Subject: Re: Is This a Web Service?



    How about leaving off the "should" on the first one, or amending that sentence to read "The service
    should provide some type of description of its interface, or restrict itself to a generic web interface." 

  I have a hard time with this.  "Generic web interface" in the REST sense says nothing about the rules for generating the URI or the format of the data to be retrieved.

  Think of Google (the "classic" HTTP/HTML version) ... it might be thought of as a Web service *if* they described the rules for generating a query (apparently pretty simple, just concatenate the search terms together with a "+"), and if they described the format (XHTML  is OK) of the result.  But it's not a "Web service" just by virtue of having a "generic web interface" -- people can use the HTML form on www.google.com and make sense of the result, but machines can't.