t and application protocol that is used to actually send the message across. So the advantage of making message definition in XML protocol independent of the transport is achieved using the concept of XMLP binding. For example, the same XML infoset could have: An XML document representation that could be sent across a vanilla TCP/ IP session. A DOM object representation that could be used to send it in a distributed computing environment. An HTML object representation that could be used to send it as a regular Web page. The XML infoset (short for information set) is an abstract data model to describe the information available from an XML document based on specification from W3C. This makes it easier to work on an XML document without the need to ana- lyze and interpret the XML syntax. There are different ways by which information XML-Based Protocols in the XML infoset can be accessed with DOM object and HTML being some of the ways that have specific APIs to satisfy the requirements of the programming language. XML protocol binding with HTTP is the most popular transport for most specifications considering that the XML protocol can be used for Web-based network and operations management. For packet-based intermittent traffic, even UDP over the XML protocol can be looked into inline with what is used conven- tionally with SNMP. 18.5 Mapping with SNMP Since the reader is already familiar with SNMP, which was handled in much detail in some of the preceding chapters, the capability of XML protocol is analyzed in this chapter by showing how we can achieve the functions in SNMP using the XML protocol. This is followed by looking at some of the XML-based protocols like SOAP and NETCONF in more detail. To start with mapping of functions for SNMP, the first requirement would be binding with UDP (user datagram protocol). This will not be a problem as XML protocol can bind with UDP and is not coupled to a specific transport protocol (see Figure 18.1). The main difference here is that XML schema is used instead of the ASN.1 s