RE: Fwd: Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML

On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 12:48 AM, Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com> wrote:

Might be interesting as a straw man.  I only became aware of this piece of work at its tail end (years after any attempt at standardization was abandoned, I think), when I guided some agonized engineers through an implementation of a soap service in perl that was supposed to provide services to a Microsoft .NET consumer: these two software packages used completely antagonistic approaches, as far as I could tell.  The "standards" were worse than useless; they should have been called web services inoperability.  There are at least two, maybe three completely different interpretations of the SOAP vocabulary based on fundamentally different conceptions of how to deliver web services, all masquerading under the same heading of WS-I.  There are layers of incomprehensible service endpoint babbledygook that makes reading the actual markup nearly impossible: it might as well be a binary format for all the benefit one gets from XML in this arena. The current situation is that the only rational way to use SOAP is to use two endpoints from the same provider, and never ever to look under the covers at the XML that is being generated for you.  At least that's how it seemed to me as an infrequent user - I don't claim to be an expert.  This particular piece of software is the tar baby of our organization - touch it at your peril.

I'm sure this is old news for many of you (or else it's a sore spot and I've just completely offended you), but it might be interesting, Simon, to explore the part that schema-oriented thinking played in this?  Or perhaps it was just a case of a poorly-run committee, and no other inferences can be drawn, I don't know.  I wonder though if this isn't actually the dark well from which a lot of anti-XML sentiment springs.  It's clearly in the web service transport layer that JSON really seems to shine, with its low-impedance match to programming language data structures, and its lack of impenetrable non-standard standards.

-Mike