Simon Fell > Its just code > Its just XML ?

As many people have pointed out in the past, XML is a lousy wrapper for XML documents (conflicting encodings, DTD's, ID clashes etc). Given the continued trend to push for SOAP to be a transport of XML messages (aka doc/lit), and its inability to transport arbitrary XML documents (see above, plus various restrictions SOAP places on the XML structure) I've been thinking whether trying to map the whole shooting match into a single xml document is the right approach. In the end this thread on xml-dist-apps pushes me over the edge, and it looks to me that managing the headers and body as two independent xml docs would be a much better solution. Obviously I'm about 4 years too late to this realization for SOAP, but I'd be interested to know if at any time in SOAP's history this was considered.