Final answer:
The Web Services Description Language (WSDL) is used to define the functionalities of a web service, typically used with SOAP, which is less compatible with REST architecture that is replacing SOAP in popularity for building web services.
Step-by-step explanation:
The XML-based interface definition language you are referring to is known as the Web Services Description Language (WSDL). WSDL is used to describe the functionalities that a web service offers, including the operations, the messages, and the data types the operations use.
A web service defined by WSDL is typically consumed using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is a protocol for exchanging structured information in the implementation of web services.
However, SOAP does not integrate well with REST, the Representational State Transfer architecture. REST is a different approach to building web services that is generally considered simpler and more flexible than SOAP.
As the popularity of REST has grown, it has become a dominant choice for building public APIs on the internet, slowly replacing the more rigid and complex SOAP-based services.