On Wed, 12 Dec 2012, John MacAuley wrote:
I had an internal discussion here in Ottawa with my dogs on this exact topic a few months ago when I defined the header.
:-)
We argued for both including and excluding the version field within the header. What swayed me to include it was the concept that if we removed SOAP from the equation, and wanted to continue using the XML schema, then a header with version number let the protocol contents exist independent of the SOAP action.
OK, that at least makes sense. However a new protocol will probably mean changes anyway, as the current messaging scheme as highly based on RPC. Also, in some protocols, say HTTP, this is handled with mime-types. Is there are a urn for what the value should be?
Additionally, the HTTP SOAP action field if 100% optional and I only provided it in the SOAP binding to make it easier for .NET clients to use (Microsoft requires the action field by default).
From section 6.1.1 in SOAP 1.1 spec:
"An HTTP client MUST use this header field when issuing a SOAP HTTP Request." Best regards, Henrik Henrik Thostrup Jensen <htj at nordu.net> Software Developer, NORDUnet