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   Re: [xml-dev] WS-Addressing to W3C: Is the Tide Turning?

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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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