I have few things that im confused about when it comes to understanding
SOAP what how it works

1.do we consider SOAP as a protocol or rather a set of rules that we
have
to follow to make an interoperable Messaging architecture?

2.How does SOAP operate over the HTTP protocol? is there an article or a
usefull source that explains that?

3.Suppose i wanted to use Web Services and SOAP as the underlying
protocol for my web services, now suppose that i would rather want to
interact with
the SOAP messages in its XML Format before going to the method
invokation, how do i do that ?