RE: Summing up on visibility(?)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mark Baker [mailto:distobj@acm.org]
> Sent: Friday, January 10, 2003 10:38 AM
> To: Miles Sabin
> Cc: www-ws-arch@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Summing up on visibility(?)
> 
> 
> 
> Would you agree that another perfectly valid way to look at it would
> be as I said before; "Suffice it to say that this is an 
> alternate means
> of doing the same thing, while respecting the uniform interface
> constraint."

I wouldn't.  I don't think you've shown that the Uniform Resource Constraint
buys much in the web services world, and it's not an authoritative part of
the Webarch document last I looked anyway.  For about the 99th time, I'll
suggest that you draft compelling examples of how realistic web services can
be implemented in a way that exploits the Uniform Resource Constraint that
don't presupposed all sorts of semantic and syntactic understanding that was
agreed to a priori ... or that doesn't presuppose Semantic Web technologies
that exist only in the lab.    

 
> I chose not to respond to the "same knowledge" part of your message,
> because we've covered that ground, and besides, for the 
> purpose of this
> thread I only wanted to get to the conclusion that visibility is
> improved in REST so that we can get some text about that into the WSA
> doc.

I think we're still trying to figure out what "visibility" is, and to the
extent we understand it, disagree that it is improved in REST.  Arguably the
WHOLE POINT OF XML WEB SERVICES is that XML makes messages more "visible"
so that standards for routing, security, reliability, choreography, etc. can
be cleanly layered in at the message content level in a protocol-independent
way.  You seem stuck in a 1996 mindset where the content was opaque and only
the HTTP headers were visible to intermediaries.  

Unless of course I'm missing the "visibility" point entirely, which is quite
possible.

Received on Friday, 10 January 2003 11:03:01 UTC