BYTE Column - What The Heck Is SOAP, Anyway?, David S. Platt Given the heterogeneity of the Internet environment, our new programming strategy needs to separate the representation of the function call from the protocol used to transport the call from one box to another. For encoding this information, we'll have to find the lowest common denominator that everyone on the Internet supports. As international air-traffic control uses English (even in France), the lowest common denominator for data encoding on the Internet is XML, and this is what we'll use for representing our function calls.