Rant Continued: Avoiding the DOM?

I agree that one of the downfalls of the current .NET Web service implementation is that it kind of shoe horns you into using the DOM to deal with XML when you might prefer to use an XmlReader/Writer or some other XML api. So an advantage of passing XML as a string is that you can load the string into an XmlReader and avoid the overhead of loading up an instance of a DOM. This idea has some merit in my mind, not a ton, but some.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mpowell/archive/2004/05/13/131377.aspx