- From: Mark Baker <distobj@acm.org>
- Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 00:43:01 -0400
- To: xml-dist-app@w3.org
On Wed, May 07, 2003 at 12:49:07PM +0600, Sanjiva Weerawarana wrote: > > What was the final verdict from the discussion on whether a SOAP > impl needs to do well-formedness checking? > > I would prefer if one could respond with a non well-formed > response for bad requests such as those rather than to force every > implementation to walk thru the whole message before doing anything. > Streaming is dammed in that case. > > It seems to me that non well-formed requests are VERY unlikely > (especially on TCP style streaming/reliable transports) except > in the case of major SOAP stack bugs. Forcing well-formedness > checking would cut out a major perf improvement opportunity to > cover a case that's way off the 80-20 or 90-10 or even 95-5 split. There are certainly lots of good reasons to do it, but as written, I believe the spec requires well formedness checking, since it normatively refers to the XML Rec, and XML documents must be well formed. RFC 3470 also seems relevant here; The IETF has a long-standing tradition of "be liberal in what you accept" that might seem to be at odds with this recommendation. Given that XML requires well-formedness, conforming XML parsers are intolerant of well-formedness errors. When specifying the handing of erroneous XML protocol elements, a protocol design must never recommend attempting to partially interpret non-well-formed instances of an element which is required to be XML. Reasonable behaviors in such a scenario could include attempting retransmission or aborting an in-progress session. -- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3470.txt MB -- Mark Baker. Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. http://www.markbaker.ca Web architecture consulting, technical reports, evaluation & analysis
Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 00:40:53 UTC