> This is of course what encapsulation is all about. Encapsulation
> prevents hacking; it raises the level of abstraction; it prevents
> programmers getting locked into today's implementation of an abstract
> service.
The XML representation is itself the product of the generic
encapsulation of the underlying resource provided by HTTP/1.1.
To imply that an XML-RPC API (for example) is an encapsulation
and HTTP is not, to me simply isn't accurate.
They are both encapsulations; the question is: which encapsulation
is better able to address the trade-offs that you raise.
