RE: REST; good for humans and machines

Mark Baker sent:

> > and I'm sure we could drum up an equally endless religous
> argument about why IIOP is superior to HTTP and should have been
> adopted, as was once proposed, as an Internet standard. Then we
> wouldn't have all these issues with HTTP...)
>
> Again, that's a common mistake of CORBA folk, and Web services folk; you
> can't compare IIOP and HTTP.  IIOP is layer 6, HTTP is layer 7.  They

Doesn't HTTP cover both layer 6 and layer 7 - and it's the layer 6 features
that
seemed initially desirable to "Web Services folk" - who then ignore(d)
HTTP's
layer 7 elements, treating it as just a typed-document exchange protocol.

(I've spent entirely too much time on OSI-related architectural discussion
to
want to go far down this path. And I especially don't want to think about
whether
HTTP has layer 5 features. Oh *!, I just have.)

Peter