Issue 501 closed

Dear Andrea and I18WSTF,

You raised an issue, 501[1] regarding the SOAP Resource Representation
Header specification[2]. Please note that this issue covers the first 4
points in your e-mail[3]. The XMLP working group considered your points
and has the following response:

Points 1-3: Yes, when using the resource representation header base64 is
always a requirement, even for textual types. The SOAP envelope itself
will always be in a single character encoding. The octet stream
resulting from decoding some base64 text may well be in a different
character encoding. This is not an issue. The character encoding in use
for such data may be determined in a number of ways, including, but not
limited to; specifying the charset as part of the xmime:contentType
attribute (e.g. text/xml; charset=iso-8859-1 ), examining the XML
declaration for XML based types (e.g. <?xml version='1.0'
encoding='iso-8859-1' ?>, using the algorithm defined in Appendix F of
the XML 1.0 Recommendation for XML based types, assuming a default
character encoding defined by the specification of the media type.

Point 4: xml:lang is not appropriate for use on the rep:Data element as
base64 is not human-readable text. A SOAP message can carry multiple
instances of the resource representation header and many such headers
may carry representations of the same resource. Thus a given SOAP
message could carry multiple representations of a given resource, each
one in a different human readable language. The resource representation
header has an extensibility mechanism that allows additional attributes
to be specified. Such an attribute could be defined to indicate the
human readable language of a text based resource. We note that there is
an example of how to use this extensibility mechanism in Section
4.4.3[5] of the CR version of the Resource Representation SOAP Header
Block specification[4]

The working group does not expect to change the Resprentation header
specification as a result of closing this issue.

Regards

Martin Gudgin
Microsoft Corp.
For the XML Protocol Working Group

[1] http://www.w3.org/2000/xp/Group/xmlp-cr-issues.html#x501
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/WD-soap12-rep-20040608/
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xmlp-comments/2004Sep/0000.html
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/CR-soap12-rep-20040826/
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/CR-soap12-rep-20040826/#rep-http-headers

Received on Wednesday, 22 September 2004 15:31:15 UTC