RE: Problem with resolution of Issue 221

> -----Original Message-----
> From: noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com [mailto:noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com]
> Sent: Monday, August 26, 2002 11:16 AM
> To: Henrik Frystyk Nielsen
> Cc: Mike.Champion@SoftwareAG-USA.com; xml-dist-app@w3.org
> Subject: RE: Problem with resolution of Issue 221
> 
> 
>  Perhaps erroneously, I  read your note 
> as suggesting that we open the possibility of PIs being legal in the 
> content of application data (I.e. head blocks and body 
> element children.) 
> That may be a reasonable technical suggestion, but I think 
> the WG clearly 
> signalled at the F2F that it doesn't want to go there. 

I'm sorry to keep asking since we all want this issue to go away, but as
someone who has to explain XML and web services technology to others, and
who is involved in the efforts to reconcile the various XML, Web, and Web
services technologies under the umbrella of a Web Services Architecture, I
would like to understand this better.  "The WG didn't want to go there"
isn't a good enough answer when explaining a somewhat controversial decision
not to allow PIs inside  SOAP message bodies.  [The DTD issue is equally
controversial, but there's a good answer: arbitrary XML can't be wrapped
inside an XML envelope because of the doctype declarations and internal DTD
subsets that can only go in the Prolog).

So, someone help me understand this:  It makes perfect sense to disallow PIs
in the SOAP markup (oops, sorry, Infoset contribution) and processing model,
and maybe header elements because they are so closely involved in the SOAP
processing model, but why make them illegal in bodies?  PI's are in "bad
odor" at the W3C (allegedly just because the early browsers did ugly things
with them), but forbidding them in SOAP messages and suggesting that
intermediaries SHOULD fault on them seems like it will cause lots of work
for the WG, the implementers that saying something like "the SOAP model does
not include processing instructions and their presence or absence MUST NOT
affect SOAP processing in any way." 

p.s. I'm not by any means speaking for the WSA WG here, just my own desire
to understand how the XML and SOAP pieces fit together.

Received on Monday, 26 August 2002 12:43:55 UTC