LC69b: support for multipart/related serialization in HTTP binding

I had a look at XForms's multipart/related serialization at [1]. It
basically puts xsd:base64Binary and xsd:hexBinary in parts of a
multipart package, and put the instance data in the root.

This is very close to what XOP does, and having the HTTP binding
support this multipart/related serialization would basically be close
to providing an HTTP binding for XOP.

Back in March 2004, the WG didn't show a lot of interest in support
XOP for the HTTP binding when we had discussions with the XMLP WG at
the TP in Mandelieu, IIRC. Also, it's not clear that there's a lot of
demand for such a serialization in the context of Web services.

As we are in Last Call and this would be significant work at this
point, and as I believe that there isn't overwhelming interest in the
Web services world for it — the comment from the XForms WG was not
requesting us to provide it either, just wondering why we didn't —, my
recommendation is that we close this issue by saying that we don't see
this as being something high priority for Web services at this point,
and that our extensibility doesn't prevent us from doing it later.

If somebody's really interested in this, is ready to do the work of
writing the serialization and provide an implementation of it, then
I'm happy to include this new serialization in Part 2.

Regards,

Hugo

  1. http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms/slice11.html#serialize-multipart
-- 
Hugo Haas - W3C
mailto:hugo@w3.org - http://www.w3.org/People/Hugo/