It really depends on your view of W3C as a standard body. > That's different from what you said in your original comment SOAP basically started as an attempt

It really depends on your view of W3C as a standard body. > That's different from what you said in your original comment SOAP basically started as an attempt to learn from the mistakes of CORBA and RPC, and I think it started with good intentions all around. When complexity hit, however, the original designers basically went "we'll deal with it in the various sub-specs, but don't worry, tooling will take care of this anyway". I do think most of them were not malicious in this approach. Meanwhile, vendors understood where the wind was blowing, and got themselves heavily involved in the various efforts - hence the proliferation of WS-* and incompatibilities. > I'm still inclined to believe a lot of it was people (both spec-makers and tool-makers) doing their best with a challenging problem Considering the amount of money and manpower that went into these efforts, ascribing it all to lack of skills would possibly end up being less optimistic - about the state of corporations, the work they produce, and what this means for human progress. TBH I think the charitable reading is just that there were too many cooks in the WS kitchen. I feel some of them burnt pans on purpose, maybe they didn't, but at this point it doesn't matter much.