Re: SOAP services as database query interfaces / SOAP design patterns?

Dan Brickley <danbri@w3.org> writes:

>> > It'd be interesting to experiment with use of a stylesheet PI in
>> > these, for linking to XSLT-based UI for web services. I understand SOAP
>> > currently discourages this, but I'd still be interested in seeing whether
>> > its a useful technique...
>>
>> I think it would be hugely useful, but the WG already rejected the
>> requests (including mine) to reintroduce PIs for this purpose.
>
> Yup, though a lot of folk beyond XMLP dislike PIs and the use of PIs as a
> stylesheet referencing mechanism. If we can't use stylesheet PIs, it'd be
> good to have another agreed way of doing it (for Web Services and in
> general). Another option might be for the SOAP spec to tolerate PIs for
> the case of stylesheet references, since there is clientside browser
> support for that technique of providing stylesheet location information
> and it'd help with making SOAP services easy to debug, test etc. Maybe
> someone might prototype a demo based on the examples above...?

An XSLT (or CSS) stylesheet for general soap would not be terribly useful.
Apart from styling the header and body, the rest would be just serialise the 
source tree in an HTML page. Which is not so easy in XSLT. However, one
thing that would perhaps make your life easier is to transform the 
xlink:hrefs into <a>

  <xsl:template match="@xlink:href">
    <xsl:text> </xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="name()"/>
    <xsl:text>="</xsl:text>
    <a href="{.}"><xsl:value-of select="."/></a>
    <xsl:text>"</xsl:text>
  </xsl:template>

An approximation of what this would give is at

http://www.w3.org/2002/11/testsoap.xml

But of course, no PIs in SOAP, and no lower-level mechanism to associate
stylesheets with documents. So take this as a thought experiment.

Max.

Received on Monday, 25 November 2002 10:45:23 UTC