W3C Web Services Description Group makes a good move.

W3C Web Services Description Group makes a good move.

While they are yet not as far as to they drop the ball, go home and call WSDL dead ;) but there's a noteworthy action item on the activity's task list as per their most recent teleconf call: "2003-03-13: Don [presumably Don Mullen from TIBCO and not Don Box from Microsoft] will write a proposal for annotating schema with part information.", which is an action item apparently added when they were talking about killing the <wsdl:message/> element. I am all for that.

When we get to the point that WSDL's job becomes not to describe a "Web Service", but rather only the applicable message exchange patterns (MEP) for a conversation between two points (which both may engage in other conversations following different MEP's), would kill the <wsdl:service/> binding (see WS-Addressing), and would then be appropriately renamed, I will be fairly happy with it.

Yet, looking at it that way, there should probably be only one WG for this instead of two. There's a Web services description and a Web services choreography WG and that's somewhat like one language designer designing "method" and another guy designing "interface" and looking at it as if they were only loosely related. Of course I may be entirely off base...

newtelligence should probably really join W3C and WS-I, so that I am not just a loud, complaining troublemaker, but an active, constructive troublemaker.