[apimade]

I spent the better half of my first professional decade writing RESTful abstractions over SOAP services and XML RPC monstrosities. I’ve done it for probably upwards of 2 or 300 systems (not interfaces, systems).

There’s one improvement XML had over JSON; and that’s comments.

The author laments about features and functionality that were largely broken, or implemented in a ways that countered their documentation. There were very few industries that actually wrote good interfaces and ensured documentation matched implementation, but they were nearly always electrical engineers who’d re-trained as software engineers through the early to late 90s.

Generally speaking namespaces were a frequent source of bugs and convoluted codepaths. Schemas, much like WSDL’s or docs, were largely unimplemented or ultimately dropped to allow for faster service changes. They’re from the bygone era of waterfall development, and they’re most definitely not coming back.

Then there’s the insane XML import functionality, or recursive parsing, which even today results in legacy systems being breached.

Then again, I said “author” at the start of this comment, but it’s probably disingenuous to call an LLM an author. This is 2026 equivalent of blogspam, but even HN seems to be falling for it these days.

The AI seems to also be missing one of the most important points; migration to smaller interfaces, more meaningful data models and services that were actually built to be used by engineers - not just a necessary deliverable as part of the original system implementation. API specs in the early 2000’s were a fucking mess of bloated, Rube-Goldbergesque interdependent specs, often ready to return validation errors with no meaningful explanation.

The implementation of XML was such a mess it spawned an an entire ecosystem of tooling to support it; SoapUI, parsers like Jackson and SAX (and later StAX), LINQ to XML, xmlstarlet, Jing, Saxon..

Was some of this hugely effective and useful? Yes. Was it mostly an unhinged level of abstraction, or a resulting implementation by engineers who themselves didn’t understand the overly complex features? The majority of the time.