Yes, it’s protocol independence theme month!
A
gem of an exchange
between the WSD and XMLP WGs.
It turns out that WSD wanted to be able to send a SOAP request via HTTP,
but get the response back on some other channel. Fortunately, HTTP supports
the 202 response code which permits the server to indicate exactly that.
But unfortunately, the
default SOAP 1.2 HTTP binding
explicitly does not support 202. It actually
used to,
but the protocol-independence promoters had it removed because they
feared, IIRC, that too much of HTTP was exposed to the application.
That made my week. 8-)
P.S. I hope to see lots of people out at XML 2004 next week. I drive down tomorrow.
It’ll be my third road trip to D.C. in as many years; about 1000 kms each way, but a
pleasure in my ride (though not
as nice as a trip to Boston through Vermont and New Hampshire!). I’ll
be announcing what I’ve been up to for the past little while too, with my latest
client.
A good
presentation
by
David Booth
which elaborates on
what I’ve been saying
for some time now; messages should be self-descriptive, and that
effectively requires an operation in the message itself (unless
you’ll only ever have
one operation).
I’ve got a couple of minor nits with the presentation, but nothing
of consequence. Nice job, David.
I see no reason to tolerate harbingers of doom unless they are being constructive.
— Roy Fielding
to the Atompub WG.
I always wanted a motto. Now I’ve got one. 8-)
I feel dirty. I actually agree with
Dave Winer;
Tim Bray suggests that Atom might nearly be finished. I read his comments carefully, and find the benefits of the possibly-final Atom to be vague, and the premise absolutely incorrect. Unlike SGML, RSS has been widely deployed, successfully, by users of all levels of technical expertise. There are many thousands of popular RSS feeds updating every day, from technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Sun and Oracle, big publishing companies like Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Newsweek, Time, BBC, Guardian, etc, exactly the kinds of enterprises that his employer serves. It’s also widely used by today’s opinion leaders, the bloggers. Where SGML was beached and floundering, RSS is thriving and growing. So to conclude that RSS needs the same help that SGML did, is simply not supported by facts.
I recently advised a client who were planning to add syndication feed production and
consumption capabilities to their product, to avoid the Atom format and go with
the RDF-based RSS 1.0 and the
Atom protocol.
That way you get the
self-descriptive extensibility
and backwards compatibility into a massive installed base of RSS processors, and a
simple protocol that integrates cleanly into the Web.