Why HTML is a strategic dead end for business transactions and e-commerce (1999)

Funny.

Among other things, XML is self describing. Yeah sure. We all know how that turned out. That was the day when everybody was crazy about the Semantic Web, and for some reason XML / some convoluted format built on XML was viewed by many as "semantic", apparently because of the many intractable URLs the format called for. Y'know, URLs, or was it URIs or URNs, those little pieces of text that, even when they point to nothing in particular, somehow have the power to bring "semantics" to the data.

If you replace XML with JSON and PDAs with phone apps he's spot on.

"Truly powerful applications can be built using combinations of JavaScript and XML"

"XML can be used to mediate between Database row-based output, asynchronous message records, and other types of business forms and data."

"Business-based TXP systems of the future will need to incorporate XML as part of their backbone services technology. The ability to read and understand an XML description of an incoming record or object, and the ability to easily generate XML to describe an outbound record or object, will be a major requirement for system-to-system, business-to-business transaction processing. Intelligent browsers will have XML built in, allowing XML to be used bi-directionally all the way up and down the business hierarchy: from PDAs to PCs to Web/App Servers to Transaction processors."

I can agree with this statement: "HTML provides a pretty face, but a lousy system-to-system transaction environment."

Imagine if we had something like JSON, but with a more standardized schema to e.g. describe something simple like a table of data. There is so much glue code being written that does nothing else than reformatting data to something an organization can actually use. Think what it would mean if every table on the web would be fully adressable with an URI, such that you can directly load it into whatever you want - pandas dataframes, tableau, a C++ vector, Excel, your next fancy executive board PowerPoint chart, whatever. Make it n-dimensional from the start and give the shape plus each column a type definition. I guess one can dream...

CSV, for all it's faults, is probably the closest thing we have to a "universal 2d table format you can import anywhere."

My prediction: HTML will die way before HTTP.

We will replace that language eventually, HTTP is here to stay.