If you'd like to escalate this to a full discussion, that's fine. Sadly, I think you've misread my arguments quite thoroughly, assuming that I was arguing about REST/RPC issues.
In fact I'm saying that your proposition of imposing SOAP Envelope elements into the definition of what an item may contain is just as distasteful as the assumption that xsi:type attributes can be scattered through a document with no ill effect on software.
Requesting that "two tags be permitted and ignored" raises some serious questions when those tags are containers - as I believe SOAP elements are intended.
There is NO defined processing model for such cases - does "ignore" mean "ignore the tags" or "ignore the element"?
That makes a huge difference on what you do with the content, and it's awfully hard to talk about ignoring tags if, for instance, you live in the world of the XML Infoset (as SOAP quite explicitly does), which has Element Information Items, not start and end tags:
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-infoset/#infoitem.element.
It's nice for all of us to assume that our projects are practical and concrete. It's nice to assume that the seeds we want to plant will grow into lovely ornamentals. Unfortunately, some of those ornamentals are kudzu, and Stop Energy is sometimes necessary:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2001If you're interested in the issues surrounding your seed, I did raise some questions on xml-dev today in a more general context:
http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200212/msg00439.htmlREST is only one set of issues. Getting the XML right matters as well.