The fault element specifies the contents of SOAP Fault Details element. It is patterned after the body element.
Table 1–8 The SOAP Fault Element Attributes| Property | Description | Required or Optional | Example | 
| name | Indicates the name of the part from the WSDL message that will be included in the fault element. | Required | part1 | 
| use | Indicates how message parts will be encoded in the SOAP fault. | Required | literal | 
| encodingStyle | Indicates a particular encoding style to use. | Optional | http://someencodingstyle | 
| namespace | Indicates the namespace of the wrapper element for RPC style messages. | Optional | urn:someNamespace | 
The following example illustrates the SOAP fault element:
| <definitions .... >
    <binding .... >
        <operation .... >
           <fault>*
               <soap:fault name="nmtoken" use="literal|encoded"
                                 encodingStyle="uri-list"? namespace="uri"?>
           </fault>
        </operation>
    </binding>
</definitions> | 
The name attribute relates the soap:fault to the wsdl:fault defined for the operation. The fault message MUST have a single part.
The use, encodingStyle and namespace attributes are all used in the same way as with Body, only style="document" is assumed, since faults do not contain parameters.