RE: Closing XML Protocol Last Call issue 395

>> I guess one could entertain the idea of defining a serialization that
introduces a DTD which is not reflected in the SOAP message infoset.

Exactly my concern.  I think we should rule this out clearly and 
unambigously in the HTTP binding and or the RFC, as appopriate.  We should 
NOT rule out the possibility that someone would do this in other bindings, 
as it's a potentially reasonable compression trick

So that's my main concern, but it's compounded somewhat by my reflects my 
partial inability to grok the Infoset rec.

At least most of the time I read it, it appears to me that if I ask: 
what's the infoset set for two otherwise identical documents, one of which 
has an internal subset and the other not, the answer I read is "no 
difference, the Infoset Rec only defines Doctype items for external DTDs." 
 I would love for someone to clarify whether I am right or wrong about 
that.

If I am right, then it's much less clear that the "obvious" serialiazation 
of an Infoset involves no DTD. 

>> Similarly one could imagine defining other information 
>> items such as additional attributes or elements that 
>> are also not reflected in the SOAP message infoset.

I'm less worried about that, as in many critical situations we're fairly 
clear that the Infoset for a message must contain ONLY what we call for. 
If there's any doubt, then we should put in an appropriate general 
indication to that effect, I think (though we should be a bit careful not 
to gratiutiously rule out things like PSVI...I would probably say 
something like "Infoset items not explicitly provided for here SHOULD NOT 
appear;  if they do appear, they MUST NOT affect the results of SOAP 
processing or message transmission."  In other words, don't act on them, 
don't transmit them.  Make sense?

------------------------------------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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"Henrik Frystyk Nielsen" <henrikn@microsoft.com>
12/05/2002 11:07 AM

 
        To:     "Martin Gudgin" <mgudgin@microsoft.com>, <noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com>
        cc:     <xml-dist-app@w3.org>
        Subject:        RE: Closing XML Protocol Last Call issue 395



>I'm not sure why this issues revolves around the internal 
>subset. We explicitly prohibit the Document Type Declaration 
>Information Item from appearing. If there is no DTD then there 
>is no internal or external subset. Lexically one cannot have 
><!DOCTYPE ... in a SOAP message. 

That's my understanding too leaving only such things as well-known
entities like &amp; etc. 

I guess one could entertain the idea of defining a serialization that
introduces a DTD which is not reflected in the SOAP message infoset.
Similarly one could imagine defining other information items such as
additional attributes or elements that are also not reflected in the
SOAP message infoset.

It is not clear to me, however, that a straight forward reading of the
Infoset spec would enable such additional information items to be
present as it would require some form of agreed infoset transformation
to be performed by the communicating parties. The definition of the
"application/soap+xml" media type certainly doesn't elude to such a
transform.

Henrik

Received on Thursday, 5 December 2002 11:37:20 UTC