The SOAP specs do not even make sense. What doesn't make much of a difference, because the only player I've seen even trying to follow them is Microsoft (go figure...).
SOAP has a broken type system that can not be extended (leading to many extension standards for things like lists (go figure, again) and complex formats that people didn't want to convert from and into). It had horrible error handling, with problems only becoming visible at the application layer. It inherited the XML's property vs. contents problem. It inherited the XML's bad DTD format.
Soap deserves to die. Taking the good parts of it would be good, but there was nobody in a position to do that, so we settled on fixing the problems and patching the good parts back with time. With gRPC, I think we are there.
SOAP has a broken type system that can not be extended (leading to many extension standards for things like lists (go figure, again) and complex formats that people didn't want to convert from and into). It had horrible error handling, with problems only becoming visible at the application layer. It inherited the XML's property vs. contents problem. It inherited the XML's bad DTD format.
Soap deserves to die. Taking the good parts of it would be good, but there was nobody in a position to do that, so we settled on fixing the problems and patching the good parts back with time. With gRPC, I think we are there.