New subset in latest SOAP draft

The recently posted proposed recommendation of SOAP Version 1.2 
Messaging Framework 
<http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/#soapinterminfoset> further 
restricts the legal content of SOAP messages that what is generally 
known:

Comment information items MAY appear as children and/or descendants 
of the [document element] element information item but not before or 
after that element information item.

In other words, SOAP messages cannot contain comments in either the 
prolog or epilog of a document. This was inferrable from the previous 
December 2002 working draft, but was stated in much less obvious 
language.

If I had to guess, I'd say this is an attempt to allow multiple SOAP 
messages to be stuffed into a single file or stream with clear 
boundaries between them. Whether that's a good idea or not, I don't 
think such a major change should be tossed out without further 
analysis and debate. This could introduce problems for various tools 
such as editors that like to stick a "credit" comment in the prolog 
of a document. This spec should go back to last call WD.


-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Processing XML with Java (Addison-Wesley, 2002)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/xmljava
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0201771861/cafeaulaitA

Received on Thursday, 8 May 2003 07:54:54 UTC