One thing I don't think I made clear in the last entry was that I actually completely agree with the idea of uniform operations where-ever possible, particularly the universal GET and POST. And one can do a tremendous amount of good with just those primitives.
But I think it's too abstract for most. You can tell even on the web by the amount of abuse that's happening to the HTTP GET method (where people enact side-effects, contrary to the HTTP spec). Most people need to be able to have various levels of abstraction - and that means specific operations. Which is what I mean by a "governed interface" -- a contract among a group of service consumers and producers. It's a way of managing an enterprise's set of microformats and coordination languages, and perhaps mapping them to more general ones.
This is a mental journey for me, certainly... I get the point behind REST, but I also see the reality of multiple protocols behind the firewall, and thus the appeal of WS-*. Perhaps it's as Tim Bray noted, we should shoot the term "web services", as WS-* doesn't have a lot to do with the web -- it certainly is "Internet" friendly, but otherwise, it would be like calling the BitTorrent transfer protocol "part of the web". Trackers are, sure, but the protocol itself is more message-oriented, as is WS-*.
