RE: Is This a Web Service?

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net]
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 1:45 PM
To: Champion, Mike; Www-Ws-Arch@W3. Org
Subject: Re: Is This a Web Service?


 
I disagree about the "how to construct the URL" part -- that's brittle at
best.  
 

Uhh, yes, that's one big reason why SOAP and WSDL looked attractive to
people who were tired of CGI hackery a few years ago -- "just give me an
endpoint to POST to and let me parse a rigorously defined message body to
figure out what to do."    
 
If I were a RESTifarian, I'd be agitating for *less* brittle ways of
defining URI interfaces.

  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? 
 

Not if the consumer is a software agent rather than a human!  The service
definition would have to say things like "The data returned is in an XHTML
table with the ID [or class, or whatever] attribute "foo"; each returned
record [or book, or website, whatever] is contained in one row of the table
... the first column is a unique  label, the second colum is the URI of the
matching resource, the third is a human readable description, the fourth is
the date the referenced resource was last updated."  Obviously one SHOULD do
this with a schema language of some sort.