Recovered from the Wayback Machine.
I’m extremely pleased to see the formation of a new working group at the W3C. It will be responsible for generating some meaning of the chaos that is Web Services. I may not be an adherant of the “Standards at all cost” club, but we do need to have standardization in three specific areas:
- Protocols
- Syntax
- Semantics
Syntax is XML, Semantics is RDF, and a public domain Protocol will, hopefully, come quickly and efficiently out of this new group.
XML as a syntax is safely within the public domain. However, there is too much implied ownership of the protocols (openly available or not), and there’s too little understanding of the importance of the semantics.
We don’t need centralized enforcement agencies such as UDDI., or centralized security paradigms such as Passport if we only have a standardized syntax, semantics, and protocol. Give me these, and I can build you an interface to anything, from anything.
My strongest hope is that the W3C moves swiftly — they’re late in the protocol game.
