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No reason to be bitter about XML having failed on the web; some important vocabularies, like SVG and MathML, have been incorporated into HTML, and some other pa
by tannhaeuser 7y ago
No reason to be bitter about XML having failed on the web; some important vocabularies, like SVG and MathML, have been incorporated into HTML, and some other parts of the XHTML effort, like XForms, really didn't work out. The web wasn't created on XML but on HTML which is an SGML not XML vocabulary, so there's no point in appealing to a glorious past that never existed (and yes, I actually developed <?xslt-stylesheet ...>-based sites in the early/mid 2000's).
If you like XML, maybe you like SGML, XML's big sister, as well. Since XML is per definition just a subset of SGML, everything that applies to XML equally applies to SGML as well. Only that SGML has additional concepts and much more power as an actual text authoring, document composition, and templating format, and, unlike XML, SGML can parse regular HTML, including HTML5.
- giantrobot 6y agoI didn't like the promise of XML on the web because I fetishize markup languages. I felt it is/was a good solution for the separation of data and presentation on the web. A website could simultaneously be a site for a browser and an API for native or web apps by serving the exact same documents to everyone. The server side could focus on data and the client would be responsible for the display or processing. It did the things modern JavaScript monstrosities do but natively in the browser. XForms even proposed to handle a lot of the stupid validation and state management that requires megabytes of JavaScript to handle today. Tons of resources are wasted every second parsing and running JavaScript to do the same thing browsers can do natively.