All good things must come to an end...

Should have known better than to get too excited about WS-Addressing. Should have known that such a simple spec would never remain that way. Remember when the "S" in SOAP stood for "Simple"? Those days are long gone.

Recent changes made, under the guise of removing ambiguity, have in fact headed us down the path of turning a very nice and terse document into another "design by committee" mess. Instead of simply making things clearer, by removing the ambiguity, they added uncertainty and even more ambiguity to things. Take the wsa:ReplyTo and wsa:FaultTo changes made. Why not just be more explicit about what it means to be present or absent? Too simple I guess. Instead they removed its meaning all together - leaving us in the position of not knowing for sure where the heck our messages will go (if anywhere at all).

The original spec was only a couple of dozen pages - something most people could easily manage. Now its split into three - or is it four since we now have an "adjunct" document? Sigh

Sometimes I wonder if going to a standards body is really the best thing for a spec. While I don't want them all to be written by just MSFT and IBM, I have to admit that watching one of the better specs take a turn for the worse like this does make me wonder if it really would be that bad. Could be the lesser of two evils. See what an ugly mood it put me in! I need some comfort food. :-)