Raw

Woke up this morning thinking about the Grid and WS-* vs. REST stuff, with a slogan in my head  -

RPC over HTTP is like driving an SUV down the railroad: you can do it, but why would you want to?

[[I suspect the imagery originally came from Justin Leavesley, the language shirley came from working with Americans (in my native tongue it would be " ...a David Brown down the A6 ( in summer)..."). ]]

Bill makes an interesting prediction:

5 years from now, Grid services that are not already on Web will be based on instant messaging, and XMPP/Atom/RDF will be the key Grid transfer protocols and formats.

That's a jolly nice selection, even without the Grid context - RDF for arbitrarily structured data, Atom where you're mostly interested in delivering a known-shape payload, XMPP where you need fast flows. Add HTML and that looks to be like 99% of network apps sorted.