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by Bill de hÓra.
Original Post: Son of the Morning
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Mark Baker is not impressed with the GUT of webservices addressing: <wsa:EndpointReference xmlns:wsa="..." xmlns:fabrikam="..."> <wsa:Address>http://www.fabrikam123.example/acct</wsa:Address> <wsa:ReferenceProperties> <fabrikam:CustomerKey>123456789</fabrikam:CustomerKey> </wsa:ReferenceProperties> <wsa:ReferenceParameters> <fabrikam:ShoppingCart>ABCDEFG</fabrikam:ShoppingCart> </wsa:ReferenceParameters> </wsa:EndpointReference> Somebody please tell me why on earth that isn't a URI? You know, something like; http://www.fabrikam123.example/acct/123456789?ShoppingCart=ABCDEFG I'm in agreement with Mark about this spec, but... oh, go on then. Let's have a dialog. Let's see - the XML structure is by design decomposable into constituent parts, ie it's a tuple with angle brackets. URIs are not like this - they're pure identifiers. According to a W3C TAG dictat, URIs are supposed to be treated opaquely, but there's no getting around the fact that a huge body of deployed web software is totally reliant on composing and deconstructing URIs. In the real world they are used as tuples/dicts and they are laden with semantics. When made that URI, we in design terms lost information by moving from a tuple to a literal. However in implementation terms we're going to frig that identifier for information embedded in it. And that's cool - the URI is lexically designed to be friggable. But if that's so, and tuples are useful means to pass information between client and server, then why is the GUT called WS-Addressing and not WS-IdentificationByDescription? ;)...