Editing SOAP (section)

===Disadvantages===
* When using standard implementation and the default SOAP/HTTP binding, the XML infoset is serialized as XML. To improve performance for the special case of XML with embedded binary objects, the [[Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism]] was introduced.
* When relying on HTTP as a transport protocol and not using [[WS-Addressing|Web Services Addressing]] or an [[Enterprise Service Bus]], the roles of the interacting parties are fixed. Only one party (the client) can use the services of the other.
* SOAP is less "simple" than the name would suggest. The verbosity of the protocol, low parsing speed of XML, and lack of a standardized interaction model led to the dominance of services using the [[HTTP]] protocol more directly. See, for example, [[Representational state transfer|REST]].
* Being protocol-agnostic, SOAP is unable to take advantage of protocol-specific features and optimizations such as [[Representational state transfer#Uniform interface|REST's Uniform Interface]] or [[Web cache|caching]] – instead having to reimplement them (as with [[WS-Addressing]]).