Re: Media type encoding parameter?

Personally, this makes me nervous. We spent a lot of time limiting   
the scope and nature of SOAPAction so that the 'reach' outside of the 
envelope was minimal. Duplicating information in different places
introduces the possibility of getting things wrong, out of sync,
interoperability problems, and bloats the messages even more.

If there's a truly compelling reason for this, sure. However, I don't
think performance is one; XML parsers are getting faster every day,  
reducing the amount of benefit making the information available to   
MIME parsers gives you.   

If there were an argument that a MIME-aware device that can't parse  
XML needs to know this information, that would be different. I can't 
think of a situation where this is true, though.

I wasn't in on the action parameter discussion, but I'm a bit
concerned by it, for many of the same reasons. We explicitly limited
SOAPAction to HTTP request-bound messages; allowing it as a media
type parameter expands its scope to any MIME-bound message, whether
in HTTP, SMTP or DIME (if media types instead of URIs are used).

If the group has agreed that that expansion is good, fine; it just
represents a big shift from what I last saw.

Cheers,


On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 11:22:32PM -0500, Mark Baker wrote:
> While writing the interoperability section of the media type, I
> realized that there may be a need for an additional optional parameter
> on the SOAP media type for specifying the encoding style[1].
> 
> The reason I think it would be useful is that it would help a
> receiving processor know whether or not they could process the message
> without breaking into the body, as with action/SOAPAction.
> 
> Usage;
> 
>  Content-Type; application/soap+xml; encoding="http://.."
> 
> Issues;
> - good idea or not?
> - name?  "encoding"?  "encodingstyle"?  "encstyle"?  "soapenc"?
> 
>  [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/#soapencattr
> 
> MB
> -- 
> Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
> Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
> http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com
> 

-- 
Mark Nottingham
http://www.mnot.net/

Received on Friday, 28 December 2001 16:30:13 UTC