Of course there has to be some kind of minimal agreement, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. This idea, "POST to some url on some action", that's pretty minimal

Of course there has to be some kind of minimal agreement, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. This idea, "POST to some url on some action", that's pretty minimal. You were arguing it was too little and wouldn't work, I was arguing it was just enough to build on without collapsing under the weight of expectations of miracles. HTTP is a remarkably simple and straightforward spec compared to some others, and HTTP servers are amazingly tolerant. As a client, you can get a lot of work done knowing only GET and POST and ignoring all the different kinds of errors and redirects. I would hold up HTTP as evidence supporting what I'm saying. Same with html. Yes, we all want our beautiful and perfect html, and we curse browsers that don't implement the specs, but honestly, renderers are so forgiving. As long as you're in the ballpark, you're going to get something something useful. SOAP, otoh. The WS-* specs. What utter misery to work with, with their outright lies about out-of-the-box complex interoperability.