Question on envelope parameter on SOAP media type

Mark,

I took an action item to check with you on the status of the envelope
parameter on the application/soap+xml media type. The issue was brought
up [1] which references a mail [2] from you with a clarification [4]
that it is not the encoding but the envelope you are referring to. That
is, the question seems to be whether we should provide an optional
parameter to the media-type indicating the version of the envelope using
the namespace identifier of the envelope (a related question is of
course whether it is not the qualified name of the envelope and the
namespace URI that identifies the envelope)

However, the discussion on thread [3] doesn't seem to have reached
closure.

I guess my question is exactly what such a parameter can be used for. In
typical cases, you would want to have parameters expressed in a
media-type that a) can be used by mechanisms that are media-type aware
(HTTP content-negotiation), or b) contains some information that is
difficult to obtain from the entity-body itself and which aides handling
of the entity-body. With respect to a) SOAP provides it's own mechanism
for transitioning between SOAP/1.1 and SOAP Version 1.2 and b) is as
always a matter of taste.

Are there any other examples of such a parameter for XML related
media-types? In case, should this be discussed in the context of the
media-type discussion in general and not as part of SOAP alone (I know
this has been discussed at least some in the past)? If we have such a
parameter, should there also be a parameter for which XML version is
used (if any)?

What is your status on this?

Henrik

[1]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/w3c-xml-protocol-wg/2002Feb/0155.htm
l
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2001Dec/0271.html
[3]
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2001Dec/thread.html#271
[4] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2001Dec/0285.html

Received on Monday, 18 March 2002 19:48:26 UTC