Proposal for resolving issue 54: Allow binding to any HTTP method

As per my action item to redraft my friendly amendment Dave's proposal
for extensible HTTP operations, I propose the following changes to the
specification:

- Add one line to table 3-1 in section 3.1.1.1 of part 3 with the
  following data:

    Method: any QNAME with a prefix
    Input serialization: application-defined
    Output serialization: application-defined
    Message Patterns: application-defined
    Operation Style: application-defined

- Change the type of binding's methodDefault attribute and operation's
  method attribute of the HTTP binding from xsd:string to xsd:QName.

Explanation:

With this extra line in table 3-1, people may reuse our HTTP binding
after having defined a new method, specifying the input and output
serializations, the message patterns and the operation style
restrictions.

The difference with DaveO's proposal, which was mimicking the XForms
1.0 submission options extensibility, is that it doesn't allow bare
names other than the ones we have defined in table 3-1 to define
identify an HTTP method with XML input and output as it can be
confusing, since this can be confusing as I have explained in an
earlier email[1] (the post/POST versus get/GET differences).

Looking at XForms 1.0 submission options that table 3.1 is based on, I
haven't understood why the type is xsd:string instead of xsd:QName,
when the values actually are QNames, so unless I missed something
obvious, I suggest we do the switch.

Regards,

Hugo

  1. http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-ws-desc/2004Apr/0066.html
-- 
Hugo Haas - W3C
mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/