I think Jorgen misses part of the point of the team comment for WS-Transfer, when he writes;

The W3C Staff comments on WS-Transfer make interesting reading – and really summarize what WS-Transfer is all about: […] WS-Transfer does not have all the features of HTTP regarding the manipulation of representations, such as caching, or content and language negotiation. However, the extensibility of SOAP would allow to add such capabilities incrementally, and it can benefit from the use of existing SOAP extensions such as WS-Security for security, or WS-Reliability or WS-Reliable Messaging for reliability.

How can it be a good thing, that all those features were lost and replaced with … wait for it … merely the opportunity to add them back in the future?! Do these folks realize the amount of money that’s been spent optimizing and deploying the Web, CDNs, and caching infrastructure in general? You think people are eager to redeploy all that? And for what, angle brackets?

Egads. Whether you believe in my position on Web services or not, hopefully you can at least appreciate that reuse and not reinvention is in everybody’s best interest. The authors of WS-Transfer clearly don’t. There’s even better ways to use SOAP for data transfer, ferchrisakes!

I’m calling bullshit on WS-Transfer. Please join me.

P.S. here’s some previous thoughts on this mess, before the W3C submission, when I was obviously in a much more agreeable mood. I guess I’m pissed off at the W3C for missing yet another opportunity to set these wayward soles straight.

Update; Thanks, Simon. Go, Mark. Even Rob can’t help himself. Kudos, Stefan.

Tags: soap, rest, web, webservices.

I was just about to blog about this, when I noticed Lucas already did it for me…
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]
“I wonder if the editors have any more sense of how wrong this is than the authors?” Indeed, it seems like critical thinking and principled design has been sacrificed at the altar of SOA. Check your brains at the door, please!
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]

If Rob was right, then this spec can only be an attempt by Microsoft to get the other co-submitters to implement and deploy a protocol which is vastly inferior to HTTP.

Sounds too insidious to me. I think it’s just bad design.

Hmm, March 15. Me thinks this was published a couple of weeks early. This is not progress. It’s reinventing (very poorly) a perfectly good and pervasively deployed wheel. Sigh.
(link) [del.icio.us/distobj]