One of the advantages of using the document/literal mode of messaging is that the information regarding the data type is not required to be specified in the SOAP message. Secondly, you can always validate the SOAP message with any XML validator program because the structure of the elements used in the message can be defined in a separate XML schema. Also, document/literal is better suited for asynchronous processing because it does not use method calls.

The document/literal mode of messaging has certain limitations as well. The WSDL document becomes a little more complicated because all data types used in the WSDL document have to be defined first in the type element, unlike in the encoded style. Secondly, in the SOAP message, no element directly corresponds to the operation specified in the WSDL document that is being called. This sometimes makes message processing difficult. The most significant limitation is that the operation name in the SOAP message is lost, which makes message dispatching difficult or impossible.