Gudge chimes in on the WS-A issue;

The WS-Addressing spec doesn’t say that you *can’t* put the content of wsa:Address into ‘the “RCPT TO” command on the SMTP protocol’. It just says you MUST put it into the wsa:To SOAP header. I wonder why Mark thought the two were mutually exclusive…

I can understand the confusion, but my concern was simply that the spec didn’t require that the address go in the appropriate place in the application protocol. That’s required in order to cleanly integrate with the architecture of the Internet (not just the Web). Otherwise the Internet is being treated as a big bit pipe, rather than as a set of distributed applications (oh, wait, nevermind 8-).

In the one Endpoint Reference, multiple protocols case, it’s fairly obvious ( to me at least ) that the value of the wsa:Address ( and corresponding wsa:To ) cannot be used as address information for all of the underlying transports ( although it might, by happy accident, work for one of them ).

Hmm, what can I say to that? Baked in to that statement is the implicit assumption that application protocols are to be treated equivalently to transport protocols. Please, please, please Gudge, take some time out to carefully consider that application protocols are very very different beasts than transport protocols. URIs, even http ones, are application layer identifiers, intended to identify anything, including customers, invoices, receipts, etc.., not just “network endpoints”, or “transport addresses”. If you’ve come from an RPC background (which I believe you have), there is simply no analogue for an application protocol in RPC architectures. But, simply because they share a name with a layer in the RPC stack, they get treated as it would in the RPC stack.

The third interesting point in completely non-technical, but rather a socio-political one. Mark raised his issue with the WS-Addressing WG who considered his request, thought about at least some of the things mentioned above and in Steve’s post and declined to take up his issue. Not being willing (able?) to take ‘No’ for an answer, Mark then raised his issue with a higher authority, the TAG, hoping, I guess, that they will make the WS-Addressing WG see the error of its ways…

Right. That’s how it works. I’m just following the process (see the Issue Resolution section). And as I mentioned to Steve, I think the acceptance of the issue is, for me, the only win I’m interested in. I don’t really care how it’s resolved.

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