Its a quarter of a century already... Enough of an empirical observation window to conclude that the way different entities choose to implement or adopt online

Its a quarter of a century already... Enough of an empirical observation window to conclude that the way different entities choose to implement or adopt online information exchange is a tortured, highly inefficient process that is ultimately just a collection of historical accidents and technological aspects or merit are secondary On the face of it is strange that there is so much friction [0]. I will just enumerate a number of bizarre outcomes that I am aware of and I am sure there are others: * the xml web still goes strong both as-is and in large number of popular or niche-but-important domains (from html, svg to xbrl, sdmx, ...) * the semantic web (rdf, owl etc.) and making some sense of all the data exchange with metadata has gone nowhere * the API web (json) is reinventing the wheel for validation, annotation (schema etc) [0] xkcd jokes aside, people do have, in principle, strong incentives to adopt common languages and standards.