This paper proposes a solution based on forward error recovery, oriented towards providing dependability of compositeWeb services. While exploiting their possible support for fault tolerance (e.g., transactional support at the level of each service), the proposed solution has no impact on the autonomy of the individual Web services, Our solution lies in system structuring in terms of co-operative atomic actions that have a well-defined behaviour, both in the absence and in the presence of service failures. More specifically, we define the notion of Web Service Composition Action (WSCA), based on the Coordinated Atomic Action concept, which allows structuring composite Web services in terms of dependable actions. Fault tolerance can then be obtained as an emergent property of the aggregation of several potentially non-dependable services. We further introduce a framework enabling the development of composite Web services based on WSCAs, consisting of an XML-based language for the specification of WSCAs.