Secure XML: The New Syntax for Signatures and Encryption

8.3. SOAP Encoding

SOAP assumes that many applications based on it will want to send encoded data labeled with its type—whether a simple type, such as character string, integer, and floating-point number, or a compound type, such as array and structure. In the case of a remote procedure call (Section 8.5), such data would consist of parameters or results. SOAP is very general, however, and has many other possible uses requiring the transmission, within XML, of typed, encoded data.

8.3.1. The encodingStyle Attribute

The specific encoding detailed in the SOAP specification is not fundamental to SOAP. To indicate how data are encoded, SOAP defines a very general mechanism based on its global encodingStyle attribute, which appears in the

 http://www.w3.org/2001/12/soap-envelope ...