Websites vs. Web Services

Question

I tried to make out the difference between websites and web services (regardless of RPC or RESTful) in words. Am I right when the client is other software (assuming that the browser is just a tool for the initial client), and the manufacturer responds in XML (assuming that this is the standard for transporting data) falls under web services (programmable web interface), otherwise its site is for people?

thanks

-Abidi

Answer 1

Yes. It could be further clarified that bots and scanners are secondary when software tries to mimic human behavior. So your high-level distinction is still worth it.

The huge difference is that websites have a dual role.

• give information
• real information

While for web services there is no presentation concept. You will find the same difference in your expression languages: while HTML cumulates both informational tags and presentation directives, xml is just information identification, organization, transformation and organization.

Historically, XML followed HTML, when people found out that there were more efficient ways to access the information provided by websites than just copying their unconfigured html pages, more or less imitating people; while at the same time everyone knew that neither CORBA nor RPC could satisfy the need for B2B communications because of the impossibility of routing through the WAN.

Consequently, SOAP, all OASIS standards and only the latest REST services, still prefer devices to be too "light" to host full-fledged SOAP packages.

Answer 2

Something like that. Of course, the client calling the "web service" may be the browser itself. I would say that the difference is that the website returns content intended for consumption by people, and the web service returns content intended for consumption by another program. In the latter case, it should not be encoded as XML; it could be anything. It is difficult to make a good distinction between a “website” and a “web service” based on the type of content returned, because there is a lot of content that can be equally well used by the person and the program. For example, a service can return a PDF file of a client’s application and can be used directly by the client as well as by a banknote printing program.

Perhaps the best definition is to say that a “website” is a collection of “web services”, some of which can return HTML pages, and some of them can return other types of data.