I\'ve been reading about \"web services\" here on SO, on Wikipedia, Google, etc., and I don\'t quite understand what they are. What is the plain English definition/descript
The best plain English explanation comes from using an analogy:
Your PHP example is a web service by that definition, because the output could be consumed by another program. But in reality, HTML screen-scraping is not a reliable or maintainable way of producing web services.