While XML and its ecosystem has faults, I love the model where annotated/hinted serialized data is sent to the client. The user agent is in charge of deciding h

While XML and its ecosystem has faults, I love the model where annotated/hinted serialized data is sent to the client. The user agent is in charge of deciding how to display that data. It doesn't need a mountain of arbitrary third party code to display that data. I've done the "transform XML with XSLT in the browser" a few times before and it worked pretty well. Writing the XSLT was a pain in the ass because the tooling to do so sucked but once it was written it just worked. It even worked inside JavaScript since that could just grab that XML, ignore the stylesheet, then proceed because it was just an XHR. The modern JSON based equivalent is just an under specified mess. XML is actually pretty cool and useful. I find JSON to be a poor replacement.