Via Haughey, a great quote from Pascal inventor Niklaus Wirth: "People seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication." Tatoo that on your forehead, post-it on your monitor, send it to the editors of XML.Com, and to the leaders of the W3C. [Scripting News]A corollary is that people also misinterpret simpleness as elegance. SOAP has a lot of pros and cons as it's now being managed by a growing body of seemingly headless chickens, but at the same time - it's hard for me to find any good use for XML-RPC besides rudimentary (and poorly designed) blogging API's and cute little services like
getStateName. Again, "Zope" has long served both REST-ian and Web-RPC ideas, long before they were ever a battle ground. It should be a better player in these services. Some of this is the fault of "Zope", but some (or more) is the fault of what I see as some design flaws in XML-RPC. See my story (which needs updating) "Zope and Web Services Story".
While a lot of people may attain simplicity, very vew attain
elegant simplicity. It's the difference between "yeah, it's simple but it works pretty good" versus "it's so easy to use! and I can still do ...!"