RE: why no doc type declaration and PIs in SOAP?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rich Salz [mailto:rsalz@zolera.com]
> Sent: Friday, September 21, 2001 10:39 AM
> To: christopher ferris
> Cc: Jacek Kopecky; xml-dist-app@w3.org
> Subject: Re: why no doc type declaration and PIs in SOAP?
> 

> I have a slight problem with saying "this message is non 
> compliant" but then saying what receivers should do when they get one.  If
I 
> choose to send the weasels after someone who sends me a DTD, that 
> shouldn't count against me in the compliance scorecard.  

We have two somewhat conflicting objectives to balance here: we want SOAP to
leverage XML technology as much as possible, but we don't want to force
specialized SOAP processors to have to implement a lot of XML stuff that is
irrelevant to SOAP.  This will require a bit of pragmatic (i.e., not
elegantly logical) balancing in the spec.

There's something to be said for making a special case for SHOULD violations
that involve XML syntax that can't be limited by an XML Schema or DTD.  I
can imagine cases where those using generic XML tools to construct SOAP
messages may get PIs or DOCTYPE declarations inserted without the user
taking deliberate action to do so.  We don't want to be too draconian in
this area, otherwise we might limit interoperability for reasons of logical
elegance rather than pragmatic necessity... not to mention creating a slew
of Frequently Asked Questions along the lines of "why does this message that
validates against the SOAP schema get rejected by SOAP processors?"

Received on Friday, 21 September 2001 11:12:41 UTC