M. Gudgin, M. Hadley, N. Mendelsohn, et al (eds), W3C Technical Reports

The World Wide Web Consortium has announced the release of four SOAP 1.2 Second Editions as W3C Recommendations: Part 0: Primer, Part 1:
Messaging Framework, Part 2: Adjuncts, and Specification Assertions and Test Collection. SOAP Version 1.2 provides the definition of the XML-based information that can be used for exchanging structured and typed information between peers in a decentralized, distributed environment.
The Primer describes SOAP 1.2 features through various usage scenarios, and is intended to complement the normative text contained in Part 1 and Part 2 of the SOAP 1.2 specifications. This second edition includes additional material on the SOAP Message Transmission Optimization Mechanism (MTOM), the XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP) and the Resource Representation SOAP Header Block (RRSHB) specifications. SOAP Version 1.2 (SOAP) is a lightweight protocol intended for exchanging structured information in a decentralized, distributed environment. It uses XML technologies to define an extensible messaging framework providing a message construct that can be exchanged over a variety of underlying protocols. The framework has been designed to be independent of any particular programming model and other implementation specific semantics. Two major design goals for SOAP are simplicity and extensibility. SOAP attempts to meet these goals by omitting, from the messaging framework, features that are often found in distributed systems. Such features include but are not limited to "reliability", "security", "correlation", "routing", and "Message Exchange Patterns"
(MEPs). While it is anticipated that many features will be defined, this specification provides specifics only for two MEPs. Other features are left to be defined as extensions by other specifications. The second edition updates and supersedes the original Recommendation by the inclusion of the accumulated errata. Changes between these two versions are described in a diff document.

[URL=http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/]http://www.w3.org/TR/soap12-part1/[/URL]
See also the W3C newsletter: [URL=http://www.w3.org/News/Public/pnews-20070430]http://www.w3.org/News/Public/pnews-20070430[/URL]