One of the nice things about being a critic of the current approach to Web services, is that the infighting amoungst the players had a chilling effect on standardization efforts, which made my job – of keeping the W3C as free from this stuff as possible – easier. Unfortunately, today, everybody seems to have come together for the worst spec of them all; WS-Addressing is now a W3C submission.
SOAP, I liked very much, just not how people were/are using it.
WSDL, I didn’t like because of the bad practice it encouraged, but I felt that it might have a role to play.
But this monstrosity actively causes harm by not using URIs as EPRs. That part of the spec has no redeeming qualities, except that it represents an attempt on behalf of the authors to Do The Right Thing regarding addressing (i.e. standardize it). Unfortunately, those authors fail to recognize that we’ve already got a perfectly good identification spec.
Update; P.S. yes, I understand than an EPR has a mandatory wsa:Address, but that doesn’t change anything, as any identifying information in the SOAP envelope is necessarily in conflict with the HTTP Request-URI. One endpoint per message, please.