RE: issue 168 proposal: xsi:type of external references in Encoding

David Orchard writes:

>> I'm confused about what you would like XMLP to do.

In the core protocol, nothing, except to indicate what feature 
specifications should do.

>> I posit that XMLP cannot/should not define any 
>> kind of additional elements/attributes for
>> purposes of encoding information about references 
>> and hints/rules on what to do with references.

Agreed. 

>> SwA does not indicate how/when to indicate that 
>> references are to be dereferenced.  It talks 
>> about URI resolution, not dereferencing.

Agreed.  I believe I am talking about resolution as well.  I may not have 
written carefully.

>> To me, it says that a receiver application may 
>> choose to follow certain rules for URI resolution, 
>> and it's up to the receiver application to 
>> know which references they should be applied to. 

Well, the use of a given URI scheme says a great deal about the resolution 
mechanisms to be used.  I think we'd agree on that.  So, "when" is at the 
discretion of the application, "how" is controlled by the URI scheme. 
Right?

...

Let me net out what I'm looking for, because I suspect it's a lot less 
than you think.  I'm looking for a useful notion of "message", as distinct 
from all the other resources out there on the web.  I completely buy the 
notion that resources carried with the message, whether in the envelope or 
in attachments, have URIs and are referenced per web archictecture.

The one one thing I'm trying to add is that, for each attachment 
architecture (SwA, DIME), we document to the extent practical the URI's 
that will be used to refer to information >>carried with the message<<. 
Otherwise, I can claim I'm doing SOAP+Attachments, use href="http://....", 
and say "well, I thought it was an attachment, too bad you had to go out 
on the web to get it."  I want to be able to say "If you're using S+A, 
then a URI of the form cid:// is an attempt to reference information 
carried with the message...at a given node where the message has been 
completely received, retrieval of the resources referenced by such URI's 
SHOULD NOT fail due to lack of network connectivity, etc."

In other words, I'm looking for a simple abstraction, presumbaly based on 
URI's, to distinguish (an attempt to reference) information that is truly 
an attachment from an attempt to reference all the other useful 
information on the web.  That's all I'm looking for. 

Thanks.

Noah


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Noah Mendelsohn                                    Voice: 1-617-693-4036
Lotus Development Corp.                            Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
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Received on Wednesday, 12 December 2001 12:37:07 UTC