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Having long been a skeptic of web services in general (for most of the same reasons that you bring up in your superb article) I am glad that the hype-pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. I especially liked your definition of Web Services as "XML in Motion", a definition which has to me served as a benchmark for most of the work I've been involved with for the last several years.
The principle difficulty with web services as defined specifically by Microsoft is that it places upon XML the onus of acting as if it was a binary brokering protocol, with the implicit added assumption that it should exist solely for the purpose of servicing COM components. The irony here is that in order to do this it is necessary to create a complex structure (and lots of standards) that add to the overhead of building applications while simultaneously ignoring XML's role as a means of transporting semantic state information.
Web Services (even in the more restrictive SOAP/WSDL/UDDI sense) will continue to get a lot of play by Microsoft, IBM, et al., but the attempt to build up a complex infrastructure that affects everything from UI to security to transaction management will probably collapse of its own weight because it relies far too much on both retrofitting the Internet to accomodate these complex standards and the continued cooperation of arch-competitors towards a level of interoperability that has relatively little demand.
Meanwhile, people will continue to build REST applications without knowing it, because such applications are the most intuitive (and most effective) ways of working with XML on the web. The web has evolved not because large companies established the standards (as much as the revisionist line would indicate otherwise), but because individuals attempted to solve local problems as simply as possible. XML web services will be no different.
Concerning RDF - RDF can be mind-bendingly complex at times, because its focus, creating relational frameworks, skirts the edge of the most conceptually sophisticated philosophical arenas of study - how we think. It is not, I will agree with Don Box on this, a magic pixie dust, but it is powerful when used properly, and has evolved the way it has because the issues that it is used with cannot be reduced into simpler forms. I suspect that the difficulty that Microsoft in general has with RDF (based upon the lack of RDF usage in everything except the rather odd channel specification developed very early on) comes from the fact that it doesn't fit easily into the API mentality that effects everything from application development to ... well, web services.
-- Kurt Cagle
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