Re: SOAP MIME Type

Noah,

On Thursday, May 8, 2003, at 11:02 US/Eastern, 
noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:

>
> 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.

So you consider different versions of SOAP to represent different 
formats? I'm afraid that I don't really see the analogy - to me, the 
SOAP case is more like having support for different versions of JPEG 
(or GIF). Isn't the content always an XML-serialized SOAP envelope, 
regardless of the version of SOAP used? And, from reading the [SOAP12] 
specs. it looked to me as if envelope version negotiation was actually 
carried out according to the rules specified in [SOAP121] Section 2.8.

However, if you really do mean application/soap12+xml (and the group 
considers that the content of a 1.1 envelope is as different from a 1.2 
envelope as the content of a GIF file is from a JPEG) then I think the 
media type should say that specifically (soap12+xml) to avoid any 
confusion that the type could be used for other versions of SOAP.

> 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 believe that this is basically what's specified in [SOAP121] Section 
2.9 SOAP Versioning Model.

- JohnK
________________________________
John Kemp / john.kemp@ieee-isto.org
(+1) 413.458.9053    /    frumioj@AOL
Coordinating Editor   /   Project Liberty