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RE: Categories of Web Service messages: data-oriented v s acti

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Categories of Web Service messages: data-oriented v s action-oriented
• From: Michael Brennan <Michael_Brennan@A...>
• Date: Wed, 6 Feb 2002 12:46:58 -0800

For some reason, there are a whole slew of messages that never showed up in
my mailbox. So I'm responding to a few comments I'm seeing in the archives.

From Paul Prescod:
> I think that we are on different wavelengths. What data does a DELETE
> message need? You have a URI for the object you want to delete, you just
> delete it.

You might just as well ask why do SQL "delete" statements need a where
clause; just specify the primary key. But developers find having more
flexibility than that to be quite useful.

> Plus you've mixed "protocol" (actions) with "data" (the content of the
> message). This makes it hard to use predefined vocabularies like RSS or
> some industry-specific one. I think that's a big problem. Using a model
> where the action is separate from the message, you can easily apply the
> same action to RSS, XHTML, or HumanML.

I disagree. That is only the case when the data vocabulary is designed in a
monolithic fashion that does not permit modularization, or if you insist
that a "protocol" cannot rely upon an XML vocabulary. I don't see that
either view is going to fit very well with the web services model.

SOAP itself uses the model I am talking about. You have an XML envelope,
with XML headers, and XML body entries that contain XML data. This envelope,
headers, and body is all part of a protocol. Is this mixing "protocol" and
"data"? If not, then where do you draw the line and say "if you put a tag
here, you are mixing protocol and data".

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