Why would I write manual parsing code every time? There already are/were XML parsers in every language I needed to integrate. SOAP is just XML. XML is easy. I'v

Why would I write manual parsing code every time? There already are/were XML parsers in every language I needed to integrate. SOAP is just XML. XML is easy. I've moved to REST implementations but I have just quite got why anyone thought SOAP itself was anything complicated. Microsoft's 'WS' implementations were a mess of SOAP, but that's a whole different story.