RE: Web-friendly SOAP

Thanks for the followup, Paul.  Your "web of links" seems to characterize
the web nicely.  Aren't MEP issues orthogonal to that?  What I'm taking
away from this exchange (an ironically asynchronous one!) is that sooner or
later *synchrony happens*, when the priority of a response rises high enough
on the stack for us to wait for it and nothing else.  But is that somehow
the essence of the Web, or is it the links?  Methinks the links.

I'm still not clear on why HTTP/UDP/IP is not HTTP and not "the Web".  I
did read the abstract, but not the rest of the paper yet, so I'll withhold
the rest of my foolish questions ... :-)

Walden


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Prescod [mailto:paul@prescod.net]
> Sent: Monday, June 24, 2002 1:05 AM
> To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Web-friendly SOAP
> 
> 
> 
> Walden Mathews wrote:
> > 
> >....
> > >but any node that can't
> > > download data from
> > > the Web using HTTP isn't really on the Web and should not 
> expect to
> > > share in the benefits OF the Web.
> > 
> > This just seems like defining "Web" in terms of HTTP, or is 
> it saying
> > something deeper?  I'll read the abstract before posing any more
> > foolish questions.
> 
> No, nothing foolish about the question. I would say that one of the
> defining characteristics of the Web is that it is a *web of 
> links*. That
> means that any document may refer to any other document with a URI and
> there is some clear way to turn that URI into some information. So no,
> I'm not defining the web in terms of HTTP. FTP also has that property.
> news: also has that property. My point is that its all very well and
> good for me to shoot a short XML document over some future HTTP on UDP
> and not expect a response. But the recipient will often need 
> to use the
> old-fashioned HTTP request-response message exchange pattern 
> in order to
> retrieve information referenced by the XML I sent. Consider 
> the simplest
> case:
> 
> <foo>
>  <xi:xinclude href="...."/>
> </foo>
> 
> Of course some applications may choose to forgo the use of URIs (as it
> seems, for instance, that ICE does) but those applications 
> are giving up
> the best part of the Web. Why use HTTP if you're not going to benefit
> from the fact that the Web is a *web of links*?
> 
>  Paul Prescod
>

Received on Wednesday, 26 June 2002 10:42:11 UTC