RE: Proposed issue; Visibility of Web services

> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-ws-request@w3.org [mailto:www-ws-request@w3.org]On Behalf Of
> Mark Baker
> Sent: Monday, May 26, 2003 10:26 AM
> To: www-ws@w3.org
> Cc: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com
> Subject: Re: Proposed issue; Visibility of Web services
> 

> So in the former case, a generic HTTP intermediary, despite not knowing
> what lightbulbs are, still knows that the request is a specific request
> for a state change (because it knows what PUT means).  In the latter
> case, a generic SOAP/XML intermediary, or even an HTTP intermediary,
> doesn't know that, so therefore the semantics of the whole message are
> less visibile to it than for the generic HTTP/RESTful case.

Hmm, maybe I see: the moons of Jupiter are "visible" in that you can see
them with a telescope, but they are not visible to unaided human eyesight.
Therefore they are less visible than is Jupiter.  But imagine trying to
explain this to an intelligent hawk (assuming that hawks' vision is sharp
enough to resolve the moons of Jupiter) -- the hawk would be mystified that
you are trying to treat a quantitative limitation of human vision as a
qualitative property :-) 

HTTP verbs are visible only because there is a class of intermediaries that
understands HTTP syntax and semaantics; standardized SOAP headers will be
visible to a new generation of SOAP intermediaries that understand the SOAP
envelope schema and and processing model and either know natively or can be
configured to work with the semantics of specific header standards (e.g.
something like WS-Security).

This strikes me as an argument for the Word Police not the TAG.  Trying to
separate out the "visibility" issue from all the other permathreads that the
REST vs Web services debate is tangled up in, what is the fundamental
architectural advantage of focusing only on things that are "visible" to the
naked eye of an HTTP-aware intermediary over allowing things that are
"visible" only to the assisted vision of an XML-aware intermediary?

Received on Monday, 26 May 2003 11:51:49 UTC