Re: MIME marking for SOAP and XP (was text/xml for SOAP (and XP) con sidered harmful)

I wrote:
> IMO, #2 is required because *current practice* is to dispatch additional
> processors off a media type, not an HTTP header or an XML namespace.

Andrew asked me offline to elaborate on "current practice".  In the most
popular web server around, Apache, a mechanism exists that allows for
handlers to be created based on anything in request_rec, which includes
the request headers.  So it is possible to dispatch from headers, at
least in Apache.  The web server I have the most experience with,
JavaWebServer, does not permit this that I'm aware of.

But whether it's possible or not is a different question than whether
it's common practice.  Custom handler creation in Apache is not a common
thing; there's somewhere on the order of 10 of them (determined by
looking for them).  I believe the fact that the default handler in
Apache dispatches on media type is what I'm speaking about; that unless
you set up a special handler (and as far as I'm aware, a special one
would need to be coded to dispatch on a header), dispatching will be
done by media type.

MB

Received on Thursday, 4 January 2001 10:29:08 UTC