RE: SOAP MIME Type

Not wanting to overcomplicate this, but I have felt for some time that the 
current MIME type system is way too limited to do what we may be about to 
ask of it.  For example, consider a purchase order in a SOAP envelope. 
Before we get to assigning it a type, let's ask what is it?   Well, in 
some fundamental sense, it's a purchase order.  Note that you can't find 
that out from the root QName.  Of course, it's equally fundamentally a 
SOAP message. And it's an XML document.  And it's, by the way, a UTF 8 or 
UTF-16 encoding of Unicode.  If it has a routing header it's also  a 
"routable message". 

I honestly view the natural semantics of these things as more of a "mixin" 
sort of model.  It seems to me that we keep trying to take little slices 
through this mixin space, and then we always find out we need something 
else.  I have no constructive suggestions for exactly what to do, 
organizationally or technically, except that I think it might be useful to 
step back and gather some requirements and use cases before inventing new 
mechanisms.

I don't want to cross-post, but David you are welcome to relay this or 
point it out to the TAG if useful.  Both lists are public.  Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------------
Noah Mendelsohn                              Voice: 1-617-693-4036
IBM Corporation                                Fax: 1-617-693-8676
One Rogers Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
------------------------------------------------------------------







"David Orchard" <dorchard@bea.com>
Sent by: xml-dist-app-request@w3.org
05/10/2003 02:08 PM

 
        To:     "'Mark Nottingham'" <mark.nottingham@bea.com>, "'Don Box'" 
<dbox@microsoft.com>, "'John Kemp'" <john.kemp@earthlink.net>
        cc:     "'Mark Baker'" <distobj@acm.org>, "'Xml-Dist-App@W3. Org'" 
<xml-dist-app@w3.org>, (bcc: Noah Mendelsohn/Cambridge/IBM)
        Subject:        RE: SOAP MIME Type



Yeah, that darned TAG ought to solve some of these issues. :-)

<snip/>
> That having been said, there's no regular way to turn a QName 
> into a URI
> [1], which I think is what Don wants to do. So, in the 
> meantime, we could
> do something like
>  XML-Dialect: "http://example.com/foo.xsd"; localname="Bar"
> making the localname parameter optional, so that we can drop 
> it once the
> QName mapping issue is solved to everyone's satisfaction.
> 
> This also has bearing on TAG issue 9 [2], and should be 
> considered in that
> context.
> 
> 1. http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist#rdfmsQnameUriMapping-6
> 2. http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/ilist#uriMediaType-9

Cheers,
Dave

Received on Monday, 12 May 2003 13:44:49 UTC