I should have blogged about this earlier, but getting back from a trip to another continent and replying to mountain of emails have certainly diluted my attention to the news release.
Binary attachment support has been a hot topic for web services communities for years. Different proposals have been made to send binaray data with SOAP. Firstly, we have seen SwA in early 2002 from Microsoft, then they changed their mind and invented something called DIME, then WS-I joined the chaos and created an Attachment Profile based SwA, now W3C has released three specifications as "Recommendations": XOP, MTOM, and RRSHB. Will this settle down all the dust? Well, it to some extend depends on the adoption of SOAP1.2.