RE: SOAP MIME Type

I have a philosophical and a pragmatic reply to this note.  First the
pragmatic one: do we really need this URI thing?  SOAP messages
aren't just raining on services after all: the sender will be directing
messages to endpoints.  Why design the system to accept all
kinds of XML dialects then design a solution for the sender to identify
the dialect?  Rather, just have the endpoint be the one that accepts
the dialect of the sender.  If you have a service S with two dialects
A and B, the endpoints can be S/A and S/B rather than S with an A
header dispatching to S/A and similar for S/B.  I realize that intermediation
has other issues, but the URI thing will hardly seems to address that either.

(I'll spare the pragmatists by sending the philosophy separately ;-)

John.

At 01:34 PM 5/12/2003 -0400, noah_mendelsohn@us.ibm.com wrote:

>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

______________________________________________________
John J. Barton          email:  John_Barton@hpl.hp.com
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/John_Barton/index.htm
MS 1U-17  Hewlett-Packard Labs
1501 Page Mill Road              phone: (650)-236-2888
Palo Alto CA  94304-1126         FAX:   (650)-857-5100

Received on Monday, 12 May 2003 14:56:20 UTC