Internet Alchemy

At last someone has produced a summary of the debate on SOAP’s use
of the HTTP response 500 to indicate an error. From the SOAP 1.1 spec:

In case of a SOAP error while processing the request, the SOAP HTTP server MUST issue an HTTP 500 “Internal Server Error”
response and include a SOAP message in the response containing a SOAP Fault element.

To me, this has always seemed to break the semantics of the HTTP protocol. In my view, the request
to the HTTP server has succeeded, but the application that processes the content of the request has
failed. In this case I’d expect a 200 OK response from the server, plus the SOAP Fault message.

Obviously I spoke too soon about the possibility of agreement in the RSS world.
We’re still no further along than we were a week ago. I’ve come to the opinion that a mutual renaming is best
for both sets of developers. I’m not particularly attached to the name RSS, in fact it has ceased
to have any real meaning for me. Neither RDF Site Summary nor Really Simple Syndication convey
the usefulness of RSS today.