xml-dev - DISCO. Re: Contextlessness (was RE: Treaty of Wulai [...])

[Paul Tchistopolskii <paul@qub.com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Andrew Layman <andrewl@microsoft.com>
To: <xml-dev@lists.xml.org>
Sent: Friday, December 29, 2000 5:14 PM
Subject: RE: Contextlessness (was RE: Treaty of Wulai [...])


> Steve Rowe pointed out that a recent mail of mine regarding DISCO[1] replied
> to a thread without adequately identifying the context of the reply. My
> apologies.  I had noticed recent pleas on this list to NOT copy the text of
> the thread and maybe as a result was too brief.
>
> The context of my original post on DISCO was a thread containing suggestions
> from Tim Bray and Rick Jeliffe that a namespace URI might be usefully
> employed to retrieve a resource from which one could get various documents
> relevant to the namespace URI.  My reply was intended to agree and to point
> to some existing work in that area.
>
> [1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/xml/general/disco.asp

For those who are too lazy to visit this ( very important ) URL,
I'm attaching a few comments from readers.

When visiting the URL , you should hit on "read user comments"
at the bottom of the page to see  the comments. All the comments
got no answers.

My comments to comments are '#'

1.

Author names? RDF? Valid XML?

It would be nice if you published the names of the authors of this spec to encourage some
kind of feedback and conversation. I also note that several of the examples aren't even
valid XML (most of the standalone elements have their closing slash omitted). Also, this
is an ideal application for RDF. Have you thought of using it here? What were your reasons
not to?
- Edd Dumbill 11 Jul 2000

# Hi. Glad to see you.

2.

Worthless
This document is worthless. It doesn't have a single coherent example, it doesn't address
discovering the DISCO file in the first place, and the SOAP reference doesn't make any
sense at all without a reference to either an SCL or service. If this is supposed to help
people understand what the heck DISCO this is about as bad as it gets...
- Anonymous 15 Oct 2000

# He-he.

3.

To repeat an earlier comment, there doesn't appear to be a mechanism for finding services
in the first place (you must know the URL beforehand). This is VERY important for certain
types of services, especially device services, since the client cannot hope to know about
these services in advance in many cases.

Anonymous 10 Oct 2000

#  You'll get the URL. Don't worry. There is some mechanism.

4.

The relationship to SOAP at w3c
Will this document be submitted to w3c? Does it have to be according to the rules of the
game?
- Anonymous 06 Aug 2000

# No need. It is already conformant.