Edd Dumbill suggests that the W3C should Kick Out the Cuckoo and send Web Services off to a new home before Web Services becomes an even larger threat to the coherence of the Web than it already is.

It's bad enough that Web Services are named that - even Anne Thomas Manes acknowledges that it's a misnomer, while insisting that the W3C should work on them. As she puts it, "Web services (based on the existing Web services architecture) aren't constrained by Web technologies." There's a name for publicly shared TCP/IP-based network technologies that aren't constrained by Web frameworks - they're called Internet technologies.

While kicking out Web Services may seem a tough thing to do, it's not very difficult to see it being a good divorce for both parties. The Web Services people can go off and do what they like without being scolded so often in public for lousy architecture and creatively unclear intellectual property policies. Its supporters can howl that "it works" or claim that it really doesn't matter without causing the same kind of collateral damage they currently seem happy to ignore.

The W3C can focus once again on the Web and things that make it work better, with a coherent architectual focus. Less pressure from impatient companies who want to slap the imprimatur of the W3C on things that aren't much to do with the Web might even be a good thing.