literal XML encoding?

Forgive me if this is the wrong place to raise this question, but I am
perplexed.

We are using SOAP to communicate high-level XML structures between
business partners. During development I was very surprised to discover
that the only value for encodingStyle is the SOAP serialisation. I can
find no clear standard for saying "the content of the body of this
message is literal XML".

Possibly the designers of SOAP were working to the remit of providing a
DLL-like API which maps well to programming language data structures,
and this was so obvious that it was not worth stating.

However we already use XML messages, defined by XML Schemas, to
communicate between our major components. This also seems a good fit
with Web services.

So my question is - does

	"R401 The XML Protocol data representation must support using XML
Schema simple and complex types."

mean that XML Schema will only be supported as part of some
protocol-specific encoding, or does it mean that we will also be able to
specify the entire body using XML Schema?

Thanks -

Francis.

Received on Wednesday, 23 May 2001 18:08:16 UTC