intertwingly

Like the StarTrek episode where a planet of bichromatic beings find some other absurd differences to justify their prejudices and hatred, the debate between SOAP and Rest rages on.  The central issue often boils down to whether or not query parameters are before or after a blank line.  Bah.

Lost in the debate is real issues, like when people who should know better look the other way when HTTP GET is used for CartModify operations, or when people who don't know any better tell people how to design systems with collections on the server and cursors on the client.  Bah.

The difference in how these terms are used is a symptom.  The underlying root cause, however, is fundamentally differing definitions of the one word "simple" ranging from "hiding the details that are not important to me" to "has the fewest number of moving parts", and people conflating the two.

TCP/IP is an example of a system with many moving parts that achieves simplicity by hiding details that aren't important to people.  HTTP is an example of a system that achieves simplicity not by hiding details but by having few moving parts.

XML and SOAP attempt to find middle ground between these two definitions, with varying degrees of success.