Weakness of Soap?

[Michael Svoboda <mi...@softwired-inc.com>]

How would you send a database query back to a unknown Soap Client?

With unknown I mean that the client should be free to use any
Soap-Implementation. Therefore it isn't possible for me to write any
Serializer/Deserializer for a special object that could hold the
information from a generic query.

Am I right that I have no other choice then to use XML for this case? I
see no flexible solution that would work with the types specified in the
Soap-Spec (i.e. Arrays, String, int ..).

Is Soap the right protocol to just send XML? What do I gain? It seems
that it isn't that easy to just send XML over SOAP. Is XML-RPC better
suited?

What do you think?