Not to take away from the rest of what you said, but I don’t think SOAP was _still_ popular in 1996. I don’t think it had become popular yet. I don’t think I even heard of SOAP before 1999 or 2000. I’m not a trend setter or anything, but if it was popular, I probably would have at least heard of it.
That's fair, I was more speaking about XML and its use as a form of binary transport. Things like WS-Management and explicit SOAP obviously came a little bit later, and SOAP-like technologies were popularized for more general use in the 2000s. I think it's fair to say my experiences in general lean more towards observing standards groups.
