- From: Eric Prud'hommeaux <eric@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 22 Jan 2001 15:48:49 -0500
- To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
I noticed that the xp requirements document now defines and requires a header [1]. Due to a limitation of two participants from an organization, I have not participated in the teleconferences or face to face meetings. However, I don't believe that there is a paper trail in xml-dist-app [2] documenting consensus on adopting this terminology/constraint from the May 2000 SOAP note [3]. Starting with a strawman like SOAP is a good way to accelerate and ground a working group such as xp, however, it enhances the risks that folks will not "think out of the box". Headers/body/footers is not the only protocol construction that provides extensibility and modularization. Adopting the terminology of "blocks" [4], it is easy to imagine other, less constraining organizations of blocks to indicate processing order, precedence, and intended recipient. For instance, these attributes may be communicated via attributes in the block element, association lists in a manifest, or scoping tags. The latter describes the header/body organization adopted by SOAP except that in SOAP, the SOAP-ENV:Body [6] conveys the intended SOAP-ENV:actor (recipient of the block) and SOAP-ENV:mustUnderstand (see [7]). I believe the working group should consider whether these symantics are always and will always be coexistentent. Otherwise, it may, for instance, be useful to treat all blocks like the headers in a SOAP envelope, capable of separately defining actor and mustUnderstand. I may also be adopting the SOAP mentality to a fault here. Perhaps there are much cooler ways to design the block assembly that I can't concieve of. 1 http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xp-reqs-05#fig2 2 http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/ 3 http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508 4 http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xp-reqs-05#g350 5 http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508#_Toc478383497 6 http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508#_Toc478383503 7 http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/NOTE-SOAP-20000508#_Toc478383504 -- -eric (eric@w3.org)
Received on Monday, 22 January 2001 15:48:49 UTC