WS-Attachments attempts to overcome three problems associated with sending attachments in a SOAP message:

1. Embedding binary data may screw up the XML tags and throw off parsers
2. Embedding other XML messages (including additional SOAP messages) may throw off parsers
3. There is a desire to break a message into records and have random access to those records.

“SOAP with Attachments” attempts to address the first two issues although it leverages MIME to accomplish the task. The third issue is solely addressed with WS-Attachments and DIME.