Hey we love to hate on XML now, but not only did a framework of markup and schema make sense at the time, markup as an interchange concept was a pretty new thin

Hey we love to hate on XML now, but not only did a framework of markup and schema make sense at the time, markup as an interchange concept was a pretty new thing in 1986. We had some scattered formatter precursors like TeX and troff but not a general purpose framework like this. Look at everything SGML begat or enabled: Docbook, HTML, XML, SOAP, WSDL/SOA, and ecosystems around transformations like DTDs and XSLT. I think the biggest failure of XML was the pesky humans who kept trying to poke it by hand instead of working with abstractions so they never saw it.