Re: 2xx/202 and "a priori"

On Mon, May 06, 2002 at 08:15:13PM -0700, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen wrote:
> >Is this an assumption that we can make?  I was not assuming this,
> >but I would agree that if we could assume this, that this issue
> >goes away.
> 
> This is really what people do with HTTP already - they do have some
> information about what a POST entity body looks like, or how to compose
> a URI query string used in a GET, etc. The notion of not requiring a
> priori knowledge is targeted at the amount of information needed in
> order to start communicating. In HTTP, one can get bootstrapped with a
> URI and a GET request. There is no reason why that wouldn't work for
> SOAP endpoints as well.

Exactly, but we don't say anything about this.  I wonder how many SOAP
developers are under the impression that if they send a SOAP message to
an arbitrary URI, and get a 200 response back, that this means that the
SOAP message was processed?  More than a few, I would expect.  Noah's
GET-in-SOAP pseudo-proposal[1] appears to work this way.

Some wording, such as what you said above, would suffice; that the
context in which the URI is discovered can provide sufficient
information to know whether a URI identifies a SOAP endpoint.

 [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/0271

MB
-- 
Mark Baker, Chief Science Officer, Planetfred, Inc.
Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.      mbaker@planetfred.com
http://www.markbaker.ca   http://www.planetfred.com

Received on Tuesday, 7 May 2002 04:02:16 UTC