Gurus in the street

I just read Clemens' post responding to Aaron's piece on what WS developers need to know about contracts. I agree with Clemens that most developers “on the street“ do not know XSD and WSDL very well. But I also agree with Aaron that they need to be aware of and think about their contracts. That doesn't mean that they need to type angle-brackets in notepad. But it does mean that they can't treat contracts as something that just happen as a side effect of creating a service implementation. The problems with that approach are well known.