[NelsonMinar]

SOAP: the gift that keeps on giving. I built two SOAP APIs for Google (Search and AdWords) and spent way, way too much time on this kind of data interop nonsense. I wrote up a quick summary of why SOAP sucks, it's still my most popular blog post. http://www.somebits.com/weblog/tech/bad/whySoapSucks.html

XML is a terrible encoding for data. Fortunately JSON does pretty well and has mostly replaced it for new stuff.