Quick agreement on core standards like SOAP and WSDL has been a critical catalyst for accelerating acceptance of the basic web services model. In response, vendors are floating an increasing number of self-interested "standards." We examine what it means to create a standard and argue that some of the recent proposals may overreach standardization`s sweet spot—and perhaps risk overwhelming web services implementations with too much complexity as a result. (By Brent Sleeper for
ZDNet.)