The W3C XML Protocol Working Group has published a note on SOAP Optimized Serialization Use Cases and Requirements. This note makes it pretty clear that the group intends to move away from XML as the format for SOAP messages. That's fine. If XML is not suitable for their use-cases, then they should use something else. One tool does nto fit all needs. However, I do wish the working group would be more open and up-front that this is in fact what they're doing. If you're not going to use XML, please stop using the word "XML" to describe what you are using. It's nto XML and its not going to be.