I have observed that since Perl modules are overwhelmingly grass-roots and initially almost always single-person efforts, this becomes a good Litmus test for a standard. (A standard is a IETF draft/RFC, W3C recommendation and the like, or Shub-Internet forbid, an ISO spec or worse. You know what I mean.) Can it be reasonably implemented by a single hacker in the spare time before 'e gives up, eyes bleeding from the tech jargon and brain trying to escape through the ears to make the dullness stop? Or do you need to throw money at the problem, assign a swat team of 9-5 professionals to crack the mother open methodically, and eventually? (Hi, Java.)

XML, for instance, falls firmly in the former camp. It's nice and small (really, look just how short the spec is), and as a proof of concept you can even hack your parser with just 200 SLOC bouncing off the regex matcher. (This is where the famous "desperate Perl hacker" meme comes from that was even expressed as a OSCON sticky badge.)

WS-anything, does not, precisely because the standards are huge and unwieldy and messy and IMO barely comprehensibly, trying to solve problems that became rapidly irrelevant (for instance, the whole SAML bullshit can be completely replaced with TLS). With the exception of LWP::Authen::Wsse, I haven't seen adoption in the Perl world. This is the same reason why our SOAP implementations lagged behind, and feature-full implementations only appeared when the heyday of RPC was already over.

tl;dr OASIS is where standards go that are not viable in real life.

Update: telling grantm about XML → facepalm of the day! ~:-| I'm gonna fetch a coffee.

Don't worry - I too could rant all day about the evils of XML and vastly over-complicated interop 'standards'.

I've still got to do this thing though :-)

You know, that XML::Compile guy could knock something up :D

Those are useful links - thanks.