- From: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen <henrikn@microsoft.com>
- Date: Tue, 11 Dec 2001 16:01:13 -0800
- To: "David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com>, "Noah Mendelsohn" <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>, "Andrew Layman" <andrewl@microsoft.com>
- Cc: "jacek" <jacek@systinet.com>, "xml-dist-app" <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
>> In general I don't see why references are different from any other >> piece of data in SOAP. We don't guarantee that data is within bounds >> or make sense in any way so why should we do that for references? A >> feature may >> provide services that involve references and of course they have to be >> used properly in order to be useful to the receiving application but >> isn't this the case for all other data too? >> > >The issue is that references are often a special data type >that applications would often like resolved/dereferenced for >their application. An application developer does not want the >hassle of the "stitching together" or retrieval process >exposed to them. > The problem - and you address this - is that >doing a general purpose reference >typing/encoding/de-referencing does not appear to be possible. Yes, where the Web provides a general purpose referencing it does not guarantee anything about the dereferencability of references. IMO, this is an inherent property of any very large distributed system. This doesn't mean that I can't sit down and make my own collection of links that all are completely internally consistent and have that set live in the bigger set. > I understand people's motivations - I had them myself at one >point - but IMHO there is no easy/reasonable/useful thing to >do given our schedule. I agree and on a slightly more serious note, I would from a general Web architecture point of view suggest that we not go down this particular slippery slope. Henrik
Received on Tuesday, 11 December 2001 19:01:48 UTC