Experiences while using SharePoint Web Services

I have been using the SharePoint built in web services to access the rows and columns of a SharePoint list. However, I had made a critical assumption that turned out to be wrong. The assumption was that when a list is accessed through the web service layer, the attributes collection would have an attribute for every column in the list. This turned out to be incorrect as only non-null columns appear to be returned.

I had also assumed that the column name would be the name of the attribute but soon found that it is the internal name which makes sense as XML attribute names cannot contain spaces.