I worked on XML-EDI "back in the day". When I came to the blockchain (Ethereum team 2014) I had high hopes that it might provide the architectural solution to t

I worked on XML-EDI "back in the day". When I came to the blockchain (Ethereum team 2014) I had high hopes that it might provide the architectural solution to the problems with XML in terms of workflow, API endpoints, and the (infamous) failure of WSDL ("web services description language"). I wrote it up in the Ethereum launch piece here: https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-this-article-youre-going-to-understand-blockchains-in-general-and-ethereum-a-next-e11df6a1d7cf https://medium.com/humanizing-the-singularity/by-the-end-of-... === quote begins === Of course, there are attempts to clarify this mess — to introduce standards and code reusability to help streamline these operations and make business interoperability a fact. You can choose from EDI, XMI-EDI, JSON, SOAP, XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, WSDL and half a dozen more standards to assist your integration processes. Needless to say, the reason there are so many standards is because none of them work properly. Finally, there is the problem of scaling collaboration. Say that two of us have paid the upfront costs of collaboration and have achieved seamless technical harmony, and now a third partner joins our union. And now a fourth, and a fifth. By five partners, we have 13 connections to debug. Six, seven… by ten the number is 45. The cost of collaboration keeps going up for each new partner as they join our network, and the result is small pools of collaboration which just will not grow. Remember, this isn’t just an abstract problem — this is banking, this is finance, medicine, electrical grids, food supplies, and the government. Our computers are a mess. === quote ends === My company uses XML in a sort of "semantic web" paradigm to describe products, and links to these documents from smart contracts to provide accurate machine-readable descriptions of things which are for sale. It works reasonably well, and maybe it'll turn into something a lot more powerful as operations expand. So we do walk the talk to some degree.