Yep... as I remember it, XML RPC was "specified" by Dave Winer, and it was really sloppy. As I remember, there was no discussion of character encoding in the spec, and if you read the spec literally, you actually HAD to generate invalid XML documents because the spec was written by someone who did not understand that there was such a thing as character encoding and that it was important. And Winer absolutely refused to add features or to allow any kind of process by which XML-RPC could evolve into something good enough to use. Then the Microsoft people who brought you COM in all its baroque loveliness got their hands on the concept and made an industrial strength, godforsaken, complex thing called SOAP. The problem with SOAP mostly stemmed from the fact that they thought that all the work would be done by compilers and IDEs and so forth... they thought all the programmer would do is click a button and hey presto they would be able to run one object on one server and another object on a second server, and who cares what happens on the wire protocol? It's the compiler's job! But that's a terrible recipe for interoperability.

Why in an earlier age, did DCE fail so miserably? It was amply backed by ginormous corporate interests.