Re: Fwd: [xml-dev] Not using mixed content? Then don't use XML

[Michael Sokolov <msokolov@safaribooksonline.com>]

On 4/9/13 5:20 PM, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> On 4/9/13 5:16 PM, Toby Considine wrote:
>> Sorry
>>
>> WS-Interoperability.
>>
>> Originally an industry consortium, no an OASIS specification
>
> That was what I was afraid of.  WS-*, aka the Death Star, was pretty 
> much the ultimate purveyor of the worst practices that schemas encourage.
>
> I would prefer to take guidance from other quarters.
>
> Thanks,
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