Chapter 2. XML Overview

When looking for a way to express the SOAP payload, the authors of the specification had a number of ways they could have gone. They could have invented their own protocol, declared that CORBA or DCOM would now be known as SOAP, or invented something new by combining existing technologies. In the end, they chose to minimize the amount of required invention by combining existing technologies. To express the content of a SOAP message, the authors chose the eXtensible Markup Language, XML.

XML contains a large number of features—far more than SOAP uses or needs. For example, the SOAP specification states, “A SOAP message MUST NOT contain a Document Type Declaration. A SOAP message MUST NOT contain Processing Instructions.” ...

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