Re: SOAP MIME Type

John Kemp asks:

>> May I ask why you would preclude use of 1.1 envelopes?

I think there are two legitimate answers to this.  The somewhat fascecious 
and negative answer would be:

a) For the same reason you don't allow an image/gif to contain an 
image/jpeg stream, even if that's what the server prefers to send back. 
You COULD define image/gif to allow both, but it would reduce the utility 
of the media type as a negotation and dispatch mechanism.  For the same 
reason, the application/soap+xml (which might better be named 
application/soap12+xml) is defined to rather strictly accept one format.

or the more liberal:

b) The media type isn't going to be completely useful in negotiating 
interop at the soap level. The media type definition is changed to include 
both forms of a soap request, and you have to look at the root qname to 
see which you've got.

I think my preference is for (a), particularly since SOAP 1.1 (for better 
or worse) encouraged text/xml anyway.

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Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
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Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 11:11:26 UTC