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

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

2.How does SOAP operate over the HTTP protocol? is there a usefull
source that i can read that goes into a simple and more detailed
explanation on this issue?

3.Suppose i wanted to use Web Services and SOAP as the underlying
protocol for that, now suppose that i would rather want to interact with
the SOAP messages in its XML Format before turning it into objects when
web method invoked how do i do that ?