TAG discussion of WS visibility issue

As many will recall, an issue was raised to the TAG about the discussion of
"visibility" in the Web Services Architecture draft document. 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003May/0069.html

The gist was:
" In my view, Web services suffer
from inferior visibility relative to so-called "RESTful Web services",
and even to other systems currently inhabiting the Internet, due to
their non-use of a constrained interface (*any* constrained interface,
not necessarily REST's uniform interface).  The architecture document
should make that clear."

The TAG discussed whether to take on this issue today.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-tag/2003Jul/0121.html
Bottom line -- the TAG declined to accept this as an issue (but also
declined to "support what WSA is doing"). 

I personally think that Roy Fielding summed it up quite well:

  Things that are universal standards are inherently more
  "visible" than object-specific semantics, because you don't
  have to go look up the non-standard semantics. It is a design
  trade-off. There is no point in convincing Web Services to use
  a uniform interface, since the whole point of WSA is to develop
  programmable interfaces

Chris Lilley seems to have made another point worth harvesting if we want to
discuss visibility further in the document:

  if its opaque tunnelling, then peeking is bad

  if it adding 'xml headers' then its not peeking, its part of
  the (extended) protocol

Thanks to Dave Orchard for his effective job of presenting the WSA WG
consensus position!

Received on Monday, 14 July 2003 21:40:09 UTC