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On Aug 12, 2004, at 1:24 PM, Mark Baker wrote:
> A service
> provider could encapsulate all that state referencing information into
> an http URI in whatever proprietary encoding they saw fit to use, and
> any posessor of that URI on planet earth could use it to late-bind to a
> representation of that state, without knowledge of that encoding.
>
Sure, but the point of WS-Addressing is standardization and
interoperability. Given that the service requester doesn't (and
shouldn't) know the internal routing and protocol translation details
behind a service interface, but these must be passed on through the
various implementation components (and back to the requester if they
must be referenced in a future operation that is part of the same
transaction), using XML in the SOAP headers is a perfectly sensible way
to do this. So, the question seems to me to boil down to whether this
needs standardizing, in which case XML seems like the obvious choice,
or whether it should remain opaque implementation detail, in which case
a URI seems like the obvious choice.
IMHO, standardization of this stuff makes sense, even though *at
present* the different implementation components that need to exchange
routing information tend to be proprietary or custom-written. After
all, you have a bunch of fierce competitors coming to the W3C and
saying that they would like to see a Recommendation for this so that
they can interoperate better. I'm inclined to give them the benefit of
the doubt. Also, at long last we seem to be getting past the
"technical" debates that for some inexplicable reason :-) tended to
line up on industry alliance boundaries. The absolutely last thing the
W3C should do, assuming they want to ever get a web services submission
again, is say "thanks, but no thanks, we don't think that needs to be
standardized."
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