Thinking of web services as SOAP message passing is wrong.
Too much concern with production-time,
not enough with design-time.
It is the service description that distinguishes web services
as a technology.
Ignoring descriptions means you get all of the overhead
and none of the advantages: impractical.
Why implement a new technology
if you are going to ignore the features that give it an advantage?
And the only kind
of practical descriptions are semantic: common agreements.
Semantic web services are a Software Engineering technology.
