RE: Does/should SOAP define an XML subset?

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rich Salz [mailto:rsalz@datapower.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 2:20 PM
> To: Champion, Mike
> Cc: xml-dist-app@w3.org
> Subject: Re: Does/should SOAP define an XML subset?
> 

>    Why does SOAP need a subset sanctioned at a high level 
> than its own  specification

SOAP doesn't. SOAP vendors probably don't care, because they already have to
check for DTDs and PIs.   The larger W3C or XML community *may*, if there is
a practical problem created by the situation where a SOAP message can be
well-formed and schema-valid, but illegal as SOAP.  I'm not convinced that
there is a real problem, but as I said it is at least an ugly wart on the
coherence of the W3C specs.  

We discussed this at a Web Services Architecture meeting awhile ago, and the
consensus was that it's really XML's problem, because XML is not
embeddedable / composable (and entity expansion creates memory management
challenges for parser implementers, etc.).  Nevertheless, it's the Web
services community that stumbled on this problem, and smoothed it out for
its own purposes (by just shaving off the problematic parts).  There is
something to be said for at least offering to help the XML people understand
the problem, and then let them choose whether or not to address it.  If they
don't, that's NOT a problem for SOAP specs, or vendors ... only for users
who get confused about what is legal in XML and in SOAP and/or try to build
SOAP messages with generic XML tools.

Received on Wednesday, 7 May 2003 15:38:29 UTC