xml-dev - Re: New internet draft on layering protocols on top of HTTP

[Edd Dumbill <edd@usefulinc.com>]

On Mon, May 08, 2000 at 08:38:33PM -0400, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> The no-brainer for me is that many protocols may not rate a trip through
> the IETF or any other organization, and that ad hoc is likely to prevail
> over organized and even necessarily coherent.
> 
> (XML already has enough internal interoperability problems that I fear
> we're used to them by now...)

We most likely have the interop problems due to the lack of IETF-like
constraints on implementation before approval of specifications. IETF
may not seem appealing or glamorous, but I'm very glad I don't 
have to figure out whether to use Netscape, Opera or Microsoft 'telnet'
for a server I want to connect to.

However, for every group prepared to fight the good fight and take a
spec through the relevant bodies, there are also those prepared to take it
into the world via the marketing department. The fragility of the web is
ever-increasing. Everything we build on top of something that's
not-quite-conformant becomes even more fragile.

SOAP seems to me to be a catalyst for thinking about these things. With
the current state of poor XML parser interoperability, I have no reason to
believe that the IBM SOAP implementation will interoperate properly with
the Microsoft one, because the underlying XML parsers won't. That needs
fixing first!

We need to slow down and figure out the implications of what we've done
so far. But I don't expect anyone to do that. I'm hoping there's some
kind of underlying ecology at work here that will save us all in the
end.

-- Edd

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