Adam Bosworth via email: “One thing that is starting to concern me quite profoundly is that SOAP, as built/supported by VB.NET is going to encourage very tightly coupled systems across the web. This doesn't seem robust to me. I started driving the XML work in 1997 because I believed that we need a loosely coupled model for cooperation between systems. What I mean by that is that a change to the implementation of a given service will not break any of its clients. For example, web sites are loosely coupled with the browser. To do this, imho, you need a model where the contract between the service and its clients is formally defined in terms of the expected wire format and protocol (much as the browser does this using HTTP and HTML). But a lot of the recent SOAP work is pushing automatic marshalling of method signatures and that means anytime a developer decides to change the shape of an object or a signature it may change the XML message format. I fear that this is going to cause a lot of pain.” Bosworth was Microsoft's thought leader on XML between 1997 and 2000. He introduced me to XML, tirelessly, made me a believer. [Scripting News]