W3C presents Key Web Services Standards

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new standards to help vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems improve Web services performance for customers.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has published three new standards to help vendors improve Web services performance for customers.

The standards body on Tuesday issued XML-binary Optimized Packaging, SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism and Resource Representation SOAP Header Block to help developers package and send binary data in a SOAP 1.2 message.

The new schemas aim to solve a much-maligned problem in sharing and employing data between different flavors of Web services software. This includes simple tasks such as sending a video clip from a handheld computer to a desktop and major jobs such as exchanging large documents among several collaborators.

A major part of the problem is that Web services (define) applications are based on XML (define). This is a sufficient language for simple reading tasks. But when a programmer encodes binary data as XML, it yields a large, or "fat" file that sops up bandwidth and slows down applications.