Mark Pilgrim:  " Joel wants something that doesn't exist (and may never exist): an enterprise-level distributed object system that's platform-neutral, vendor-neutral, language-neutral, patent-free, and that enjoys wide industry support. Lots of luck with that. Meanwhile, pundits will keep having these pointless little flame wars about wire protocols, and programmers will keep scraping HTML pages because 99.99% of the information we want is only exposed through web pages anyway."

I generally agree with what Mark wrote. Nevertheless, I'm still excited that google has offered a programmer interface to its search engine at all.  Granted, as Paul Prescod argues, having a URI that yields XML is potentially more powerful than just providing a SOAP interface.  (It would be wonderful to be able to give someone a URL (to get XML in return) rather than directing others to a programming interface.)  Still, a SOAP interface is better than no sanctioned programming interface at all (yes, one can scrape the HTML from google but one might be violating google's term of service doing so....the excitement about google's API is the fact that it's inviting programmers to use it openly.)

Ed Dumbill is concerned that W3C is loosing control over the whole web services field -- and that the big companies are pushing the whole ball of wax into proprietary systems.  Yes, that might be right.  But the W3C better get into the game with the "big boys" to protect the interests of the Web...How will it do so?