Re: Issue 133: SOAP and Web Architecture: Draft sentences for HTT P binding preamble.

"Williams, Stuart" wrote:
> 
>...
> 
> Its the bit around " translated into French" (2nd occurence of the phrase)
> that leaves me stranded and feeling that there is something missing from the
> narrative.

There sure is. I typed <complete works of william shakesepare> and
forgot that the less-than signs would be interpreted as tags. 

<p>Let's examine the case for QUERY architecturally (as opposed to
pragmatically). The idea is that sometimes you have a "lot of data"
and encoding it as a URI is inconvenient. As you can see, this is not
really an architectural issue at all. It is just as valid to have a
resource like: "http://www.somesite.com translated into French" (which
would unquestionably use GET) and to have one like "&lt;the complete
works of William Shakespeare literally included&gt; translated into
French". And in fact there is no good way when you are setting up a
service to know whether the end-user is going to enter a little bit of
data, which should go into a GET or a lot which should go into a
QUERY. So QUERY is not architecturally necessary nor useful.

> I think you are asking the question of, with two GET like methods
> (GET/QUERY), how would does a client (forming a query) make the choice over
> which one to use and... if the difference is only the size/convenience of
> the query string then really its not an architectural issue, in which case
> I'm inclined to agree.

That's exactly what I'm saying. Plus we are degrading an important
architectural principle which is that all queries go through the URI
syntax so that the web achieves a sort of "closure". Barring access
control and network hiccups, all of the "information" on the Web should
be URI addressable. The translation of <the complete works of william
shakespeare into french> is information on the Web if it can be fetched
without modifying server state somewhere.

 Paul Prescod

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2002 20:14:39 UTC