Oh this is just too rich. Two of the architecture astronauts behind Atom have decided that WSDL is too complicated. I don't disagree with them; I just find it amusing based on their work elsewhere.

June 15, 2005 — Two of Sun’s sharpest engineers think that one of the bedrock specifications for Web services is too difficult to use, so they’ve proposed alternatives. “If you print out the WSDL 2.0 specification, it comes to 140 pages or something like that,” said Tim Bray, director of Web technologies at Sun and co-inventor of XML. “It’s not light reading. You’re not in Stephen King territory. It’s densely loaded with abstractions.”

XML standards architect Norman Walsh said he encountered difficulty when he tried to build a Web service and wanted to describe it. “It was not clear to me at all where to start because it’s all very abstract. It’s designed to be flexible in every conceivable way,” he said.