Why XML Infosets are used in SOAP1.2

Hi

What is purpose of representing the contents of Soap Envelope  using XML Infosets?

Quoting from SOAP 1.2, Part 1, Section 5 - "A SOAP message is specified as an XML Infoset that consists of a document information item with exactly one member in its [children] property, which MUST be the SOAP Envelope element information item. This element information item is also the value of the [document element] property. The [notations] and [unparsed entities] properties are both empty. The [base URI], [character encoding scheme] and [version] properties can have any legal value. The [standalone] property either has a value of "yes" or has no value." 
Does this mean that A SOAP message would consist of - a SOAP Envelope + "some thing"? If yes, how the latter would be represented?
From SOAP 1.2, Part 1, Section 4.2 - "As described in 5. SOAP Message Construct <http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/>, each SOAP message is modeled as an XML Infoset that consists of a document information item with exactly one child: the envelope element information item. Therefore, the minimum responsibility of a binding in transmitting a message is to specify the means by which the SOAP XML Infoset is transferred to and reconstituted by the binding at the receiving SOAP node and to specify the manner in which the transmission of the envelope is effected using the facilities of the underlying protocol.
Again does this mean that SOAP XML Infoset consist of - a SOAP Envelope + "some thing"? If yes, how the latter would be represented?
In SOAP1.1, the only thing which is exchanged between two communicatinng SOAP peers is the SOAP envelope (essentially the XML document). 
Is this the case with SOAP1.2 as well or *some additional information* can be exchanged (in addition to SOAP  Envelope) in SOAP 1.2 
The binding framework does NOT require that every binding use the XML 1.0 serialization as "on the wire" representation of the Infoset; compressed, encrypted, fragmented representations and so on can be used if appropriate. A binding, if using XML 1.0 serialization of the infoset, MAY mandate that a particular character encoding or set of encodings be used."
This means that, *potentially*, SOAP messages can be serialized using something other than XML. I believe that, XML is central to idea of SOAP, which makes it a far better distributed messaging framework than the legacy ones. If we remove the "XML Serialization" out of SOAP, would it be able to keep all its promises??
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
regards,
Naresh Agarwal

Received on Monday, 22 July 2002 11:42:24 UTC