RE: XMLP Issue 4 Closed (re DTD and PIs in SOAP Messages)

Feel free to forward this to the XML protocol working
group for further discussion, if you believe appropriate.

Although you've made technical progress, I'm not
sure that the wording is precise enough to be
unambiguous:

" A SOAP message SHOULD NOT contain processing
 instruction information items."

I cannot tell, from this statement, whether the
(recommended) XML declaration is not recommended
in SOAP messages. http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#infoitem.pi
says "The XML declaration and text declarations for external parsed entities
are not considered processing instructions."
even though syntactically XML 1.0 defines the
"<?xml version="1.0"?>" as a processing instruction.
(I think the idea is that the XML declaration is just
omitted from the infoset, but this is probably an issue
with the XML Infoset Proposed Recommendation).

By making reference to the infoset rather than the
processing instruction syntax, the status of XML
declarations in SOAP messages isn't clear.

Note that XML 1.0 says

 "XML documents should begin with an XML declaration which
  specifies the version of XML being used."

I think this will not be a problem if it is resolved
that SOAP messages are not "XML documents" but rather
"SOAP message bodies using XML" with MIME type
  application/soap+xml

Received on Thursday, 4 October 2001 11:27:02 UTC