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Re: Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Elliotte Rusty Harold on Web Services
• From: "Simon St.Laurent" <simonstl@s...>
• Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2003 12:13:47 -0500
• In-reply-to: <20030210120105.N2173@w...>

distobj@a... (Mark Baker) writes:
>We need less protocols, not more, because we need more
>interoperability, not less.

Hmm...  that feels to me a lot like the trade-offs in XML between
obsessively standardizing for interoperability and allowing people to
customize systems to meet their own needs.

I can find some sympathy for standardization, and think Jon Bosak's made
some nice points with UBL (at XML 2002, and also at [1]) that a few
standardized vocabularies are good to have, but I find arguments that we
need fewer vocabularies (which I've heard from parties other than Jon)
pretty unconvincing.  

I have a hard time believing that we need fewer protocols for similar
reasons.  HTTP is great for what it does, but I'm not very happy with
partisans who insist that we should build everything on HTTP for greater
interop, whether RESTish or SOAPish.  That notion has some real
problems, as described in [2], though www-tag discussion [3] seemed like
a massive effort to avoid acknowledging them.

BEEP seems like the right middle ground to me.  It lets developers use a
shared framework for exchanging secure messages, but leaves the nature
of the messages open.  That feels like a good fit with XML generally.


[1] - http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,864778,00.asp
[2] - http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3205.txt
[3] - http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2002Apr/0033.html

-- 
Simon St.Laurent
Ring around the content, a pocket full of brackets
Errors, errors, all fall down!
http://simonstl.com -- http://monasticxml.org

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