Exactly. But to be precise, REST would be the equivalent of SOAP and the format described in this post would be equivalent to WSDL [1].

And then, we'll need a central location to store all of these API descriptors and UDDI [2] will be back with a vengeance.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery...

When I see this post, the first thing to pop up is SOAP as well. Just that SOAP is not human-readable. Then I suddenly remembered that it wasn't SOAP itself that include the schema but the SOAP providers would generate WSDL alongside a SOAP endpoint.

From someone who is unexperienced in soap, what is the problem with it?

SOAP is an abstraction that is fundamentally unhelpful (at least in my opinion). Without SOAP, to call a webservice, as a developer, I need to read the documentation for the webservice to understand what data needs to go into what places. With SOAP, as a developer, I need to read the documentation for the webservice to understand what data needs to go into what places; but the documentation is much harder to read, and complex types are usually much harder to use (there's a tendency to model things as lots of complex xml, which are often hard to construct, instead of just a specified transform to a string)