XML was the perfect storm of dot-com cool (it’s somehow part of the web!), serious enterprise (there’s money in it!), and simply being reasonably easy to implem

XML was the perfect storm of dot-com cool (it’s somehow part of the web!), serious enterprise (there’s money in it!), and simply being reasonably easy to implement: most software products work with some kind of data, so you can always come up with an XML angle. The crypto/web3 hype shared the first two aspects but not the third (it’s almost impossible to do something meaningful with crypto in an existing product, as companies like Meta with their now-dead NFT integrations found out). Generative AI may be crossing the threshold of ticking all three boxes again, as APIs become easier to use and enterprise interest ramps up (because companies don’t want their employees copy-pasting trade secrets into ChatGPT).