SOAP, OSI Layer 6 and Aspect Oriented Programming

I read this article "Web Services and the Forgotten Layer Six". Anyway, it talks about how SOAP makes the Presentation layer (i.e. Layer 6) of the OSI stack more concrete.

By focusing on leveraging web service standards (particularly related to SOAP headers) as a means for standardized sharing of context, operational policies (such as credential-based authentication, QoS routing, compression, encryption, caching, data validation, and protocol/data normalization) can be implemented and configured as layer-six functionality. Implemented as message interceptors (either in process as SOAP handlers, or as out-of-process SOAP intermediaries) they can seamlessly be introduced in the path of message flows to and from applications, without developer intervention.

Strange, but this looks awfully farmiliar to Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). The article goes on:

Centralized management and monitoring of layer-six policies enabling deployment and change of policies from a central location.

Again, all too familiar! In short, the true value of SOAP (if you really want to know) is that it's becoming the standard envelope for XML messaging. So, if you want to have AOP like functionality applied to Web Services, you only need look at Layer 6.