I just ran into Tim Bray’s “Sharecropper” blog entry. Tim writes;

You’re not a sharecropper, especially not a sharecropper, if you’re building on the Web platform. If you can define your value-add as a series of interactions via a browser, or an interchange of XML messages, nobody can whip the land out from under you.

If you want to understand self-description, look no further than that last sentence fragment, “nobody can whip the land out from under you”. What that means is that the semantics of the message are grounded entirely in the realm of public specifications. I don’t happen to believe that “XML messages” are necessarily very self-descriptive, and I’d expect Tim to agree; I’m sure he was just over simplifying.

Werner thoughtfully relays some of his experiences in technology evangelism.

This is interesting, much appreciated, and respectfully received, but alas, not completely relevant to my situation from my POV.

The Web has already won. I’m just out there letting people know that. Many think that the Web needs Web services in order to enable machine automation, but they are mistaken.

What would you do if you knew how to solve many problems within the constraints of an existing, insanely succesful architecture? I think I’ve tried it all; simple examples, more complex examples, comparisons, and explanations (I could dig up more).

Moreover, what would you do if you had studied many large scale systems, and noticed that they all shared one common constraint. but that the “approach du jour”, which was being promoted as suitable for large scale use, didn’t use it?

Werner writes;

I had a sort of knee-jerk reaction when Mark took this opportunity to once again show the world why REST is the way to build systems.

Actually, I didn’t, I was just drawing an analogy; I was showing how transport becomes transfer when data is exposed to the application. I wasn’t suggesting that because of this, that all transfer apps over RS-232 needed to be RESTful, though I believe that many (not all) can be. Again, this is an example of the generality of the Web and REST being mistaken for universality; how do I say that there exists a 70% solution for things you might want to do over the Internet, without people thinking that I’m saying that it’s a 100% solution?

I’m not going to respond to the points about evangelizing, because I don’t feel that this is what I’m doing; technology evangelists primarily attempt to encourage uptake of their technology for the purposes of benefiting that technology. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m out there promoting the Web because it’s vastly superior to the Web services approach – so much so, that Web services will fail to see much use on the Internet (i.e. they’ll fail).