Jon’s Udell nails it with his analysis of wrapper technology for weblog content:
“I like its RESTian purity, though I’d also be open to a SOAP variant that could optionally leverage all of the authorization and routing machinery”
I wonder if it can be proved that any 2 dimentional SOAP message can be represented entirely as a 1 dimentional URL of a certain length. I suspect that this is the case, and if so, then the only thing that the REST model does not allow is to create a secure login mechanism that blocks access proactively. The REST model requires retroactively blocking access based upon IP address.
In which case, perhaps you could have a URL encoded wrapper for RSS feeds, with a generic SOAP login wrapper if required. Perverse perhaps, but useful.
In either case, the specification for the wrapper of weblog content should not specify the format used – i.e. it should be able to be represented in SOAP or as a URL. To allow this means not merely separating the message from the envelope, but the envelope from its routing and security specification.
Authentication should not be part of the wrapper specification for weblog content.