Intent of SOAP fault code extensibility

Looking through the archives of this list I find that the issues arising

from the extensibility of SOAP fault codes as described in section 4.4.1

have been raised but not answered.

It is not clear to me whether the extension mechanism is intended for
use 
in future versions of the SOAP specification, in related specifications
or 
by service authors.

Although the SOAP spec recommends doing so, it would seem to be a bad
thing 
for me to create my own fault code using the SOAP envelope namespace
since 
I don't control it.

Since the fault codes are XML qualified names I have to resort to
substring 
comparisons if I just care about Client faults and not sub codes such as

Client.Authentication.

If I go ahead and define codes for my service such as
Client.Authentication 
using namespace http://paul.earthconnect.com/fault-codes am I violating
the 
spirit of the spec?

Can somebody who was involved in creating this section of the spec
elaborate 
on the intent so I don't head off into left field? 

I realize I could communicate my own code in the fault detail (except
for 
header faults) but it's not clear to me that I shouldn't use the fault
code 
directly (of course it's equally unclear that I should, which is why I'm

raising this issue).

Thanks,

Paul John Gibbons
Software Architect
EarthConnect Corporation
(206) 417 8000
http://www.earthconnect.com
 
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Received on Monday, 8 October 2001 19:03:59 UTC