Web Things, by Mark Baker

“Queries expressible as URLs. (straw poll: yes 9, no: 1)” Yeah!! But who’s the smart ass? 8-)
(link) [Mark Baker’s Bookmarks]

I’ve wondered before where exactly Tim Bray stands on Web services. Now I know.

I agree with him more than I disagree, but there’s something I very strongly disagree with him about. Where I do agree with him is in the need for simplicity; things have gotten totally out of control, and we need to fall back to what we know works.

Where I disagree with him, is where he says that certain technologies – XML, URIs, HTTP, SOAP, and WSDL – work today, because he’s seen them work. I don’t personally think seeing one, two, or even a handful of working examples is sufficient. I want to see rabid success be a requirement for admittance to that list. So, IMO, the list should be XML, URIs, and HTTP.

I would really like to understand Tim’s support for WSDL. To me, if you think WSDL is a good idea (at least in its current form viz a viz WSDL 1.1 and WSDL 2.0), then you necessarily believe that state transfer, and, well, the Web itself, is somehow an insufficient basis for large scale distributed computing. I know Tim’s an absolute Web fanatic, which is why I’m at a loss to explain it.