I was talking with Scott Hanselman (gratuitous name drop) about the difference between rpc and document style. It took me a moment since I don't deal with SOAP internals much any more. It occurred to me shortly thereafter that I don't really care other than I have a bias towards document style.

My take is that the angle brackets need to go away from the average developer's day to day experience. I've had a similar argument with cohort Scott Came over how much developers should really know about XML. He says everyone should know and understand the details of infoset and schema, where I just see this stuff as file formats. Angle brackets are already starting to go away as the various tools are coming of age. XML is a great file format and will exist for many years to come, but I don't expect to read it on a day to day basis any more than I expect to pop open my favorite word processor and start typing RTF control words.