need of encoding style?

Hi all,
	I am a SOAP user and I had posted the question in apache soap user's
list.  I have been redirected to this list for the clarity/suggestion. 
My question is related to 'why should encoding style information be part
of SOAP request?'.  If encoding style feature is there in XP also, then
I have this question still.
	My description is below:

  The encoding style is used on the server side to serialize and
deserialize XML to corresponding programming language (java,c++, etc)
class instances. But the main question is why should client be aware of
this?  If server is using an encoding style "my_cpp_encoding" and java
client knows how to serialize and deserialize its data to XML (probably
using encoding style "my_java_encoding"), then specifying
"my_cpp_encoding" in the SOAP request looks stupid from client's point
of view, isn't it?  IMHO encoding style is *to do with implementation on
server side* (and should not be part of request/response data) and
client should not be asked to send that info.
       Let's say I have a java application which provides SOAP interface
and has mapping of xml elements to java classes (either implicitly like
XML Java databinding or stored somewhere on server side in some
.properties file), then a VB client need not send any encoding stuff
right?
	Any comments??

regards,
Gopinath.M.R.