RE: text/xml for SOAP (and XP) considered harmful

I have not seen a reply regarding the points below.  Modestly, I think they
are good points and quite relevant to the continuing discussion, so I bring
them to your attention again.

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Layman 
Sent: Wednesday, December 13, 2000 3:56 PM
To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
Subject: RE: text/xml for SOAP (and XP) considered harmful


The proposal to use an elaborated form of Content-Type, e.g.
"application/soap+xml",  does not solve a major problem of content types,
namely that they are not tied in with URIs and consequently are not
manageable or extensible in a decentralized way.  

Regarding a specific proposal that would, in effect, use a URI in place of
"soap+" in the above example, MURATA Makoto wrote

"This has been already discussed in the IETF-XML-MIME mailing list, 
and has been turned down.  First, a document may contain more than 
one namespace.  Second, existing implementations of MIME does not 
use parameters."

Concentrating on the reasons given, which must be the reasons by which we
judge the proposal, and not on the fact that the point has been discussed
elsewhere, 

a.	The essence of the idea of using a URI in lieu of "+something" is
not that it must be the element name of the root element, but that it is an
identifier from the universal resource identifier namespace, and so operates
with the same decentralized authority that has proved essential in URLs,
SOAPAction headers and XML Namespaces.

b.	Existing implementations should indeed be considered.  Is it
asserted that all existing implementations process
"application/something+xml" in the intended way?  Or is it asserted that
many existing implementations can be adapted to the more elaborated form of
content type, but cannot be adapted to use parameters?

Received on Tuesday, 19 December 2000 14:12:32 UTC