XML Protocol
Encyclopedia
The XML Protocol is a standard being developed by the W3C XML Protocol Working Group to the following guidelines, outlined in the group's charter
:
Further, the protocol developed must meet the following requirements, as per the working group's charter:
Charter
A charter is the grant of authority or rights, stating that the granter formally recognizes the prerogative of the recipient to exercise the rights specified...
:
- An envelope for encapsulating XMLXMLExtensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards....
data to be transferred in an interoperable manner that allows for distributed extensibility. - A convention for the content of the envelope when used for RPC (Remote Procedure CallRemote procedure callIn computer science, a remote procedure call is an inter-process communication that allows a computer program to cause a subroutine or procedure to execute in another address space without the programmer explicitly coding the details for this remote interaction...
) applications. The protocol aspects of this should be coordinated closely with the IETF and make an effort to leverage any work they are doing, see below for details. - A mechanism for serializing data representing non-syntactic data models such as object graphs and directed labeled graphs, based on the data types of XML Schema.
- A mechanism for using HTTP transport in the context of an XML Protocol. This does not mean that HTTP is the only transport mechanism that can be used for the technologies developed, nor that support for HTTP transport is mandatory. This component merely addresses the fact that HTTP transport is expected to be widely used, and so should be addressed by this Working Group. There will be coordination with the Internet Engineering Task ForceInternet Engineering Task ForceThe Internet Engineering Task Force develops and promotes Internet standards, cooperating closely with the W3C and ISO/IEC standards bodies and dealing in particular with standards of the TCP/IP and Internet protocol suite...
(IETF). (See Blocks Extensible Exchange Protocol)
Further, the protocol developed must meet the following requirements, as per the working group's charter:
- The envelope and the serialization mechanisms developed by the Working Group may not preclude any programming model nor assume any particular mode of communication between peers.
- Focus must be put on simplicity and modularity and must support the kind of extensibility actually seen on the Web. In particular, it must support distributed extensibility where the communicating parties do not have a priori knowledge of each other.