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Re: Redefining the meaning of common nouns

• To: Rick Jelliffe <ricko@a...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Redefining the meaning of common nouns
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Thu, 28 Nov 2002 06:00:03 -0800
• In-reply-to: <1038472726.25572.2766.camel@ibook>
• References: <1038472726.25572.2766.camel@ibook> <015701c296d7$5f573140$4bc8a8c0@A...>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021016

Rick Jelliffe wrote:

>  "Web services" are not just CGIs, so I think Eric's definition is not 
> really enough.
> The point about web services is that they provide some metadata that 
> allows you to find or use them: for example, that they may advertise 
> or have schemas. 

Rick, I think you are missing Rick's point. In 1996 Alta Vista was 
well-known to be a web service. It would have been common sense to say 
it was a web service. It was  a service. It ran on the Web. Therefore, 
it was a web service. Many companies set up departments called "Web 
Services."

Then some marketroid decided ot hijack the term and specialize it to 
"XML artificats blah blah metadata blah blah blah". That was a stupid 
decision. Almost everyone agrees that that was a stupid decision. The 
question is whether the W3C should now ratify that decision so that 
people like my wife and your cousin will be permanently confused about 
what computer people mean by "Web Service" or whether the W3C should 
invent a new term so that elite, cutting edge computer people can use 
the term the same way everyone else has been using the term as common 
sense since the mid 90s.

> So that some software can say "I want to find a certain service" or 
> some other software can also say "tell me what format/schema is being 
> used."

According to this definition, eBay, Google and Yahoo are not web 
services. This will surprise literally millions of people. More people 
than have ever heard of XML schema or WSDL.

  Paul Prescod

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Redefining the meaning of common nouns
    • From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>

• References:
  • Redefining the meaning of common nouns
    • From: Eric van der Vlist <vdv@d...>
  • Re: Redefining the meaning of common nouns
    • From: "Rick Jelliffe" <ricko@a...>

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