I have a simple question.
What are people doing when they read xml 'over the wire'?. It would appear
that the logical structure of an xml document (to wit
[1] document ::= prolog element Misc*
) is at odds with the protocol specified for things like a http put operation.
For which a response from the recipient cannot come until after the operation
is performed. As a consequence of which, the input socket remain open (being a
two-way stream in order to write the response) after the object has been read.
In which case EOF is not a useful hint that the document is complete.
The same problem will appliy to connections which are kept alive for extended communications.
We could well assert a specific document structure, - for example prescribing
miscellaneous content after the document element, but i'm wondering what the
general W3 intent was.