Re: Questions about the SOAP 2.1 draft

On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 07:05:01PM -0400, Jones, Matthew wrote:
> I have a few questions about the 1.2 draft:
> 
> 1.  There is discussion about SOAP over HTTP, but it doesn't specify
> what version of HTTP is expected although all references are to HTTP
> 1.1.  Is there a requirement or expectation of version 1.1.  I think
> that some of the processing (for an implementation) can be simplified if
> only HTTP 1.1 was supported.

HTTP/1.1 is a superset of HTTP/1.0; if you support HTTP/1.1, you must
support interacting with 1.0 clients and servers. While it would be
considerably simpler to implement only chunked encoding for
persistence (for example), content-length is an equally valid means
of persistence in 1.1, and must be supported.

Of course, you could define a HTTP/1.1-with-only-chunked-encoding
binding and use a port other than 80, but then everyone implmenting
that would most likely have to either build their own HTTP stacks, or
modify the ones in use to assure that content-length isn't used. You
also wouldn't be able to use the current Web infrastructure too well
(most HTTP intermediaries are still HTTP/1.0, as 1.1 is more
difficult for them to suppor than it is for user-agents and origin
servers).

Cheers,

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

Received on Saturday, 15 September 2001 20:18:17 UTC