A quick comment before I run for my lecture :) > > What you're looking at is SwA .. MTOM is not that IMO. > > Same deal for either really, just in one case you have hrefs and in > another you have xop:Includes. > There's a huge difference.. SwA results in two data models. One for the XML and other for the attachments. XOP avoids this.. It's just this one XOP:include element..But it makes a huge difference.. AFAIK when we see a href in a some XML there's no way we can tell for sure that there's a referenced attachment which should logically map here.It's just a ordinary attribute.. But whenever we see a XOP:Include we can definitely tell that "okay.. There's a attachment which should be logically map to here.". This automatic mapping results in just one data model.. XML infoset with XOP..
This point comes in to play mostly when these two kinds of messages were encountered by programs that look only at the payload without looking at schema or other things.. One example is WS-Security.. ~Thilina
