The lost art of XML

And yeah, XML wasn't perfect -- people harping on it are literally flogging a dead horse. Had the horse been given a pasture, it would have recovered. Instead we have very tiny pig-horses like JSON and YAML and three dozen other "weekend project candidates to someone's claim to fame and CS history" which haven't got half of XML's _useful_ features -- like namespaces, being one.

YAML has anchors, which is a useful feature in itself -- so no, we don't just regress or reinvent the wheel, there's room for improving XML. The tragedy is throwing the baby with the bathwater, or so it seems to me that we have.

Giving XML largely the collective boot was the wrong decision. That's my firm opinion. Tools like XSLT haven't got an equal today -- these for better and for worse need XML in some capacity, and are much more extensible (no pun intended) than abominations like Jinja or what have you. XSLT was _designed_ while Jinja for one, appears to have been grown in a petri dish of sorts.

The hipster-like obsession with every new thing on the hill gave us HTML 5, with its weird context-sensitive parser rules where some tags can be closed, some must be closed and some must not be closed and so on. On top of it it mandates some forgiving behaviour on part of the parser, making best-effort assumptions that kind of get it to render the document but not the one you wanted -- add modern scripting and you are sitting there debugging subtly but by-design hidden errors -- instead of what was the case with XML that demanded you had the basic capacity to write the forward slash in the right places. But no, that was apparently too hard.

Also, really love the choice quotes in the article:

> They are the result of path dependence and fashion, not considered engineering judgment.

_Fashion_ is the word that comes to my mind every time I have to hear people half my age try to sell me JSON or YAML. Like, what basis do you have to argue on bare mention of something you haven't even worked on, just essentially repeating the person on your left? That's _cargo-cult programming_ again. The fact that mention of XML often draws use of that very term, "old-fashioned", speaks enough of the level of the conversation here -- we're apparently occupied by _fashion_ in choices of systems that by and large do the same thing their predecessors have done since the 60's.

> We value familiarity over rigor. We value the appearance of simplicity over actual simplicity, which is the simplicity that comes from clear rules and consistent structure.

Just the cherry on the cake, frankly. The entire "The Final Point" section really nails it for my part. I spend considerable amount of time at work trying to hammer into rookies essentially the equivalent of:

> Formality in data representation prevents entire classes of errors.

But it would appear history repeats itself as every generation has to learn too late the same mistakes that someone in the previous generation could have written a large book about, as a _warning_. Just the other day, for example, one of my let's say less rigorous colleagues said outright that "`null` is great in a [programming] language" (the exact wording was something along of "I love null!"), following up with the dubious clarification that this also includes SQL. I am not sure they even comprehend the size of the hole such statement makes.

UAE's AEP (Al Etihad Payments) launched AANI (It is actually based on India's phenomally successfully "UPI" - its technology stack was licensed to UAE) as digital payments platform.

Jaywan is UAE's domestic cards scheme (in competition to Visa, MasterCard, etc.) (It is actually based on India's successfully RuPay technology stack, licensed to UAE).

And Jaywan uses XML for its files!

So these brand new banking initiatives in Middle East, use XML as the primary file format, because those Banks know that all the thousands of fields/columns in the CBS (Core Banking System) and upstream and downstream system, need a strict file format specification for file loading, processing, Reconciliations, Settlement, Disputes/Chargeback, etc.