Problems about the Spectrum Data Model from the view of a Web Service programmer

[Gerard]

> 
> I.e. any mix of text, attribute and element content is allowed. Which SOAP
> standard are you looking at?
> 
> If you meant that mixes of element and attribute children are not allowed
> in
> rpc/encoded style (I don't know whether this is true), then let's not
> worry
> about that, because rpc/encoded is deprecated (in the WS-I basic profile
> and
> therefore in the IVOA Basic Profile for SOAP) and we shouldn't use it.
> 
> If you meant that .NET doesn't support mixed content, then we can consider
> accomodating such a broken toolkit (as we do by using "wrapped"
> document/literal in other services), but it's not obvious that we should
> do
> so.
> 
> If you meant that the WS-I basic profile has a ruling against mixed
> content,
> then we should take that seriously.
> 
I think irrespective of this, we might in the IVOA attempt to not use mixed
content in serialisations of data and metadata simply beacues of examples as
Alasdair mentions. We can do without and it will be much simpler to
transform between different representations (code, databasesof a given
underlying model if every data element is explcitily named. 

Mixed content will allow things that are hard to make sense of in an
automated fashion, like

<tag1>34<tag2>35</tag2>36<tag3>hello</tag3>76</tag1>

Such mixed content is fine fore (X)HTML documents, but imho should be
avoided if possible for serialisations that are to be read by machines.
Let's try to be as explicit as possible please.

Gerard
> Please clarify.
> 
> Guy Rixon 				        gtr at ast.cam.ac.uk
> Institute of Astronomy   	                Tel: +44-1223-337542
> Madingley Road, Cambridge, UK, CB3 0HA		Fax: +44-1223-337523