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Amy Lewis wrote:
>
>...
> It's exactly as opaque to computers as a bag of name-value pairs, or
> the parts of a MIME multipart/related message. If you'd like to give
> REST a rest and recovery, try getting rid of MIME, which is equally
> guilty of most of the alleged sins of SOAP.
MIME does not claim to be a protocol. It is a data format. It has no
responsibility to signal intent other than to declare content-type. I
have no conflict with (nor interest in) the data format bits of SOAP. If
they were split off from the protocol bits then I would have no problem
with them.
HTTP is a protocol. It has a standardized way that responsible
application developers can signal to intermediaries what they are trying
to do. So do SMTP etc. They can be subverted, no doubt. But they provide
*explicit, standardized, means* that help responsible application
designers to do the Right Thing. Not only does SOAP NOT provide these
means (because as a protocol, it is an RPC, not application protocol),
it undermines HTTP's by requiring people to do the Wrong Thing with
respect to HTTP.
Paul Prescod
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