The "XML" label is a marketing term that persists from 2000. SOAP has
emerged as the de facto message specification, and SOAP is essentially an
XML-based specification. So you could just as easily call them "SOAP Web
services". You're safe if you stick with the term "Web services"!

Jeffrey Hasan, MCSD
President, Bluestone Partners, Inc.
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Author of: Expert SOA in C# Using WSE 2.0 (APress, 2004)
http://www.bluestonepartners.com/soa.aspx

Jeffrey is right. But prior to standardization of Webserivces,
people/corporations were using a kind of remote procedure calls via http, and
some people coined a generic term webservices, which was generating either
xml or a kind of html and other custom tags mix and match. So to avoid
confusion, the XML Webservices term has been introduced.