I thought that this was an interesting annoucement from the W3C around XML protocols. In particular I’d point you to the XOP recommendation if you have struggled with how to efficiently send medium to large chunks of binary data via web-services.
Unfortunately it doesn’t do much for me because when I look at the web-services overhead for doing things like WS-Security, its actually the verbose XML elements that I want to strip out, not the content between them. I guess we’ll have to wait for efficient stack to stack communication with Indigo to reach my nirvana.