intertwingly

I've always wondered about your essays. Who's the target audience?

Half of the things I've read from you specifically both "Gentle Introduction" articles as well as the WSDL 1.1 article seemed to lack any real meat for me. All I got out of them was a good collection of links and a fuzzy feeling about the ideas therein.

Now if your audience is supposed to be devs who already know about the technologies or manager-types who just want an overview then I guess the feel of your articles is alright. If not, then as a fairly technical person I don't really get much out of these essays beyond a fuzzy idea of what technologies or techniques your are in favor off without much technical detail.

I did like "What Object Does SOAP Access" and "Expect More".

PS: Feel free to return the favor about the articles at http://www.25hoursaday.com/writings.html if you want. I like critique about my overall writings and typically don't get enough of it.

Well, Dare, clearly you are not it. ;-)

I try rather hard to identify my target audience at the top of my essays. And they get a steady stream of visitors from places like schools and other technical folks whose area of expertise is different than ours. I actually got a laugh when I read that the latter link referred to that particular article as "a little more technical".

What concerns me is that most people's first exposure to a subject like SOAP is seeing an RPC style request with things like xsi:type (largely traceable back to Apache) and unnecessary namespace declarations (tried ASP.NET lately?) and recoil in horror.

Most of these essays have as a motivation a real debate that I was having at the time with a real person. My real purpose to these essays is to plop out a complete thought so that I can refer to it later as a convenient shorthand. It saves time.