The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the body that sets web standards. It is, for instance, responsible for looking after the HTML standard amongst other things. Those other things include a newly formed panel to look at standardising the underpinnings of web services.

According to InfoWorld, Microsoft has been acting very strangely about the whole thing. The idea is to allow complete web services to be built using components from different vendors. If there is a common 'choreography' as the W3C calls it, that should make life much easier. Enter Microsoft. It has already been working on this type of thing with IBM and BEA. The three companies have created something called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS).

When two Microsoft representatives turned up at the first meeting of the panel, you might be forgiven for thinking that maybe the company was considering working with the W3C to make sure that BPEL4WS worked with the future standard. Especially as BEA is already taking part. But the Microsoft reps took a look at what was going on and promptly quit the panel.

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