Internet-Draft Mark Baker Expires: December, 2002 Idokorro Mobile, Inc. Mark Nottingham BEA Systems June 26, 2002 The "application/soap+xml" media type draft-baker-soap-media-reg-01.txt Status of this Memo This document is an Internet-Draft and is subject to all provisions of Section 10 of RFC2026. Internet-Drafts are working documents of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), its areas, and its working groups. Note that other groups may also distribute working documents as Internet-Drafts. Internet-Drafts are draft documents valid for a maximum of six months and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to use Internet- Drafts as reference material or to cite them other than as "work in progress." The list of current Internet-Drafts can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/ietf/1id-abstracts.txt The list of Internet-Draft Shadow Directories can be accessed at http://www.ietf.org/shadow.html. Feedback or discussion about this draft should be directed to the XML Protocol Working Group public mailing list, xml-dist-app@w3.org with archives at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/ Abstract This document defines the "application/soap+xml" media type which can be used to describe SOAP 1.2 messages serialized as XML. 1. Introduction SOAP version 1.2 (SOAP) is a lightweight protocol intended for exchange of structured information between peers in a decentralized, distributed environment. It defines an extensible messaging framework that contains a message construct based on XML technologies that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols. This specification defines the media type "application/soap+xml" which can be used to identify SOAP messages serialized with XML 1.0, carried in MIME or MIME like protocols that support the concept of media types for which a SOAP binding has been defined. 2. Registration MIME media type name: application MIME subtype name: soap+xml Required parameters: none Optional parameters: charset This parameter has identical semantics to the charset parameter of the "application/xml" media type as specified in [XMLMIME]. action See Section 5 of this document. Encoding considerations: Identical to those of "application/xml" as described in [XMLMIME], Section 3.2, as applied to the SOAP envelope infoset. Security considerations: See Section 3 of this document. Interoperability considerations: See Section 4 of this document. Published specification: See [SOAP12P1] and [SOAP12P2]. Applications which use this media type: No known applications currently use this media type. Additional information: File extension: SOAP messages are not required or expected to be stored as files. Fragment identifiers: Identical to that of "application/xml" as described in [XMLMIME], Section 5. Base URI: As specified in RFC 3023, Section 6. Also see [SOAP12P1], Section 6. Macintosh File Type code: TEXT Person & email address to contact for further information: Mark Baker Intended usage: COMMON Author/Change controller: The SOAP 1.2 specification set is a work product of the World Wide Web Consortium's XML Protocol Working Group. The W3C has change control over these specifications. 3. Security considerations Because SOAP can carry application defined data whose semantics is independent from that of any MIME wrapper (or context within which the MIME wrapper is used), one should not expect to be able to understand the semantics of the SOAP message based on the semantics of the MIME wrapper alone. Therefore, whenever using the application/soap+xml media type, it is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that the security implications of the context within which the SOAP message is used is fully understood. The security implications are likely to involve both the specific SOAP binding to an underlying protocol as well as the application-defined semantics of the data carried in the SOAP message (though one must be careful when doing this, as discussed in [SOAP12P1], Section 7.3.1). Also, see the full SOAP 1.2 Part 1 [SOAP12P1], Section 7. In addition, as this media type uses the "+xml" convention, it shares the same security considerations as described in [XMLMIME], Section 10. 4. Interoperability considerations There are no known interoperability issues. 5. The "action" parameter This optional parameter can be used to specify the URI that identifies the intent of the message. In SOAP 1.2, it serves a similar purpose as the SOAPAction HTTP header did in SOAP 1.1. Namely, its value identifies the intent of the message. The value of the action parameter is an absolute URI-reference as defined by RFC 2396 [URI]. SOAP places no restrictions on the specificity of the URI or that it is resolvable. Although the purpose of the action parameter is to indicate the intent of the SOAP message there is no mechanism for automatically computing the value based on the SOAP envelope. In other words, the value has to be determined out of band. It is recommended that the same value be used to identify sets of message types that are logically connected in some manner, for example part of the same "service". It is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that the URI be globally unique and stable over time. The presence and content of the action parameter MAY be used by servers such as firewalls to appropriately filter SOAP messages and it may be used by servers to facilitate dispatching of SOAP messages to internal message handlers etc. It SHOULD NOT be used as an insecure form of access authorization. Use of the action parameter is OPTIONAL. SOAP Receivers MAY use it as a hint to optimize processing, but SHOULD NOT require its presence in order to operate. 6. Authors' Addresses Mark A. Baker Idokorro Mobile, Inc. 44 Byward Market, Suite 240 Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA. K1N 7A2 tel:+1-613-789-1818 mailto:mbaker@idokorro.com Mark Nottingham BEA Systems Level 15, 235 Montgomery Street San Francisco, CA, US. 94104 mailto:mnot@pobox.com 7. References [XML] "Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.0", W3C Recommendation, February 1998. Available at (or ). [INFOSET] "XML Information Set", W3C Recommendation, 24 October 2001, Available at (or ). [XMLMIME] "XML Media Types", RFC 3023, January 2001. Murata, M., St.Laurent, S., Kohn, D. [SOAP12P1] "SOAP Version 1.2 Part 1: Messaging Framework", W3C Working Draft (work in progress), December 2001. Gudgin, M., Hadley, M., Moreau, JJ., Nielsen, H. . [SOAP12P2] "SOAP Version 1.2 Part 2: Adjuncts", W3C Working Draft (work in progress), December 2001. Gudgin, M., Hadley, M., Moreau, JJ., Nielsen, H. . [URI] Fielding, R., Masinter, L. and T. Berners-Lee, "Uniform Resource Identifiers: Generic Syntax", RFC 2396, August 1998.