xml-dev - RE: Microsoft's DISCO proposal and XML packaging

[Matt Sergeant <matt@sergeant.org>]

On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Julian Reschke wrote:

> 
> > From: Edd Dumbill [mailto:edd@usefulinc.com]
> > Sent: Wednesday, July 12, 2000 12:37 AM
> > To: xml-dev@lists.xml.org
> > Subject: Microsoft's DISCO proposal and XML packaging
> >
> >
> > I've just read http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/disco.asp
> > "Draft: Discovery of Web Services (DISCO)"
> >
> > ...
> 
> Thanks for the pointer.
> 
> I am also a bit concerned about the fact that one supported scenario for
> "discovery" seems to be:
> 
> a) issue HTTP get
> 
> b) if content type of response is "text/html" parse (!) HTML (!) document
> and try to discover a HTML "link" element to the actual disco document. This
> would require that anybody who wants to use this mechanism needs to have a
> HTML parser (unless XHTML is required, but I haven't seen this as
> assumption).

HTML parsers are almost as readily available as XML parsers. Certainly
there are ones for Perl, Python, C/C++ and Java.

I think the reinvention of the wheel is more significant than this.

-- 
<Matt/>

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