Not sure why the article equates XML with SOAP.

Request:

   GET /customers/43456 HTTP/1.1
   Host: www.example.org

Response:

   HTTP/1.1 200 OK
   Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

   <customer>Foobar Quux, inc</customer>

Seems fine to me. In fact, having named elements without the requirement for a dictionary makes parsing straight to an object-representation (without an intermediate property-list) much easier.