OSCOM4: Roy T. Fielding on development issues - and simplicity

simplicity web

Very insightful keynote by someone who...well someone who is hard to categorize in a few words as he's done so much for the web at large. Have a look at his homepage if you don't know who Roy is. Here are just a few random notes.

A quotable statement with which I fully agree: XForms and several other w3c recommendations are not used because they are not simple enough. Note that Roy didn't say too complicated - very polite of him.

He also noticed that no one is touting SOAP-based web services as the Next Big Thing That Will Solve Everything anymore - but at the same time, practical web services are appearing everywhere, based much more on REST principles than the SOAP. In his words, REST has won - I agree and it is Good News - simplicity wins once again.

Roy also mentioned WHAT, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group. These people take a pragmatic view to the problem of rich web applications, proposing solutions based on HTML, which can apparently be easily implemented in today's browsers. Something to follow for sure...

Update: Arje has posted his own impressions of Roy's talk