The Generality Paradox
Tim Bray: “But… the APP Service Doc is totally specific to the needs of one particular RESTian protocol. So, we have existence proof that there is at least one useful instance of a service declaration. We do not really have existence proof that such a thing can be generalized across the needs of multiple protocols or applications.”
As I’ve said before, “The more effort that is put into generalizing a solution, the less applicable it is to any given problem”. Although counterintuitive, Atompub is so broadly applicable to many different types of applications specifically because the range of use cases for which it was specifically designed was kept small and focused. In contrast, tremendous effort has been put into making WSDL as broad and as generalized as possible, thereby making it useless.