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It isn't that simple. Your company, Oracle, Sun, Intel, IBM
and so on have committed to web services. Most have product
at or near the loading docks. The promise is interoperability
across products from hard competitors. Tim and Tim can
both advocate rational standards processes, but the fact is,
code and hardware are shipping soon. That means the web
services specifications must come to the forefront of the
W3C's attention or the W3C will politely but firmly be
pushed to the back of the room while these competitors
work out a level of interoperability they are comfortable
with. The only dampening effect on that is that web services
so far are not yet an imminent part of the customer software
system strategies. They are on the burner, but not the
immediate focus. Edge systems should drive that to the
front burner and edge systems do not typically require
fine grained interoperation, so pulling these into an enterprise
system via the current working baseline specifications should
not be hard.
As to the Semantic Web, it is irrelevant to me at this time. Why
do I say that? I am a Microsoft Thrall. From a purely
practical perspective, what I need to do know comes from the
MSDN. The Jan 2001 MSDN provides a set of baseline specifications
and the specs proposed for the Global Web Services. RDF is
never mentioned. RDDL is never mentioned. Except for WSDL
and UDDI, maligned on this list, none of the favorites of
XML-Dev are mentioned. That tells me that beyond WSDL
there is a very deep division of labor and perspective
about what specifications are important to web services.
For the implementer, for the business and marketing
manager, this pushed WSIO to the front of the organizations
to pay attention to when adopting policy with regards to
web services. The other side of that coin is that the
WSIO has to produce, and given that this is a direct
engagement between extreme competitors (read Ellison's
comments of late), that is going to be a very hard production.
If the standards bodies really want interop, they better
get ready to move fast in the rapids. Anyone who shoots
the rapids can tell you it requires intense focus.
REST may be great guys. I'm all for it. But the specs
the WSIO has before them don't mention it. If you think
that is of value, if you think you need RELAX over XML
Schema, then the W3C has a helluva sales job to do and
as far as I can see, there isn't much customer interest.
Prove me wrong, please. Otherwise, "The Web" is also
irrelevant. What we need from HTML and URIs, we already
have. What we need from XML, the WSIO is standardizing.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Joshua Allen [mailto:joshuaa@microsoft.com]
This is great; a rational perspective on the WSI vs. W3C story:
http://www.sys-con.com/webservices/articlenews.cfm?id=176
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