To be fair, the neat parts of SOAP, WSDL, still is pretty neat. XML is mostly hated because named closing tags make it stupidly verbose -- a big mistake. After that it was extra complicated which made platforms like PHP have crappy implementations, I guess.

But having to rewrite lots of boilerplate code for everyone's JSON or "REST" API is annoying. There's even projects to describe JSON schemas and APIs because that's actually useful. Maybe this time it'll be simple.

Transactions over SOAP (WS-AtomicTransaction I think) is also sort of neat I guess, but too complicated to be useful on the Internet?

> After that it was extra complicated which made platforms like PHP have crappy implementations, I guess.

If the implementations are bad, the specification may be not simple enough.

That is funny. Considering Dave Winer's long history with hands on RSS, XML-RPC, (and his close seat to watch the disaster of SOAP)