RE: Is This a Web Service?

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Walden Mathews [mailto:waldenm@optonline.net]
Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2003 1:16 PM
To: Anne Thomas Manes; Www-Ws-Arch@W3. Org
Subject: Re: Is This a Web Service?


 
How about leaving off the "should" on the first one, or amending that
sentence to read "The service
should provide some type of description of its interface, or restrict itself
to a generic web interface." 
 

I have a hard time with this.  "Generic web interface" in the REST sense
says nothing about the rules for generating the URI or the format of the
data to be retrieved.
 
Think of Google (the "classic" HTTP/HTML version) ... it might be thought of
as a Web service *if* they described the rules for generating a query
(apparently pretty simple, just concatenate the search terms together with a
"+"), and if they described the format (XHTML  is OK) of the result.  But
it's not a "Web service" just by virtue of having a "generic web interface"
-- people can use the HTML form on www.google.com <http://www.google.com>
and make sense of the result, but machines can't.