ITU-T X.892

This Recommendation International Standard specifies the messages required for Fast Web Services. It specifies ASN.1 SOAP messages which carry the same semantics as W3C SOAP messages. The exchange of ASN.1 SOAP messages provides Fast Web Services. This specification references other ASN.1 Recommendations International Standards and the Web services specification W3C SOAP 1.2 to fully define application exchanges that use Web protocols and W3C SOAP functionality. This is an extension to the provision of Web services using W3C SOAP messages, without any change to the functionality of W3C SOAP and service description languages. The main change is to the use of compact and easily-processed binary encodings of XML data, rather than character encodings. The use of this Recommendation International Standard (with the ASN.1 SOAP messages encoded using the ASN.1 Packed Encoding Rules, PER) allows applications to provide Web services using messages that require less network bandwidth and less processing power (and hence provide a higher transaction processing rate) than use of the character encoding of XML data. This Recommendation International Standard also specifies a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) media type that identifies an ASN.1 SOAP message encoded in PER. It also specifies a MIME media type that identifies a W3C SOAP message infoset encoded as a fast infoset document (see ITU-T Rec. X.891 ISO/IEC 24824-1). Both of these MIME types are used by this Recommendation International Standard.