DIME lends itself to the packaging of a SOAP message with "attachments", or additional data payloads that may be referenced from within the SOAP message. The convention that the White Mesa SOAP Implementation follows for this purpose is defined in the internet draft WS-Attachments:

When Transporting binary data (such as images, files, etc) over SOAP, the required serializing and deserializing can cause a significant amount of overhead. Therefore, there are times when sending information through web services where it makes more sense to keep data intact as binary data, thereby reducing the XML parsing overhead.

Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) is a lightweight, binary message format designed to encapsulate one or more application-defined payloads into a single message construct.

This document defines the media type "application/dime". Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) is a lightweight, binary encapsulation format that can be used to encapsulate multiple application defined entities or payloads of arbitrary type and size into a single message construct. The only parameters described by DIME is the payload type, the length, and an optional payload identifier.

Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) is a lightweight, binary message format that can be used to encapsulate one or more application-defined payloads of arbitrary type and size into a single message construct.

Direct Internet Message Encapsulation (DIME) is a lightweight, binary message format that can be used to encapsulate one or more application-defined payloads of arbitrary type and size into a single message construct.