At last someone has produced a <a href="http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/xml-dist-app/2001Jun/0015.html">summary of the debate on SOAP's use
			of the HTTP response 500</a> to indicate an error. From the <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/SOAP/#_Toc478383529">SOAP 1.1 spec</a>:
		
		<blockquote>
			<p>
				In case of a SOAP error while processing the request, the SOAP HTTP server MUST issue an HTTP 500 "Internal Server Error"
				response and include a SOAP message in the response containing a SOAP Fault element.
			</p>
		</blockquote>

		<p>
			To me, this has always seemed to break the semantics of the HTTP protocol. In my view, the request
			to the HTTP server has succeeded, but the application that processes the content of the request has
			failed. In this case I'd expect a 200 OK response from the server, plus the SOAP Fault message.</p>