[coldtea]

XML has been "spooky old technology" for over a decade now. It's heyday was something like 2002.

Nobody dares advertise the XML capabilities of their product (which back then everybody did), nobody considers it either hot new thing (like back then) or mature - just obsolete enterprise shit.

It's about as popular now as J2EE, except to people that think "10 years ago" means 1999.

[rhdunn]

XML is used a lot in standards and publishing industries -- JATS, EPUB, ODF, DOCX/XLSX/..., DocBook, etc. are all XML based/use XML.

[coldtea]

Yes, there's a handful of niches. Still 1/1000th the momentum it had, or adoption it was expected to get, and nobody under 40 even considers it for new stuff.

[michaelbarton]

Without being facetious, isn’t HTML a dialect of XML and very widely used?

[graemep]

Also in finance. XBRL and FIXML although I do not know how widely used the latter is.

[girvo]

I kind of miss SOAP. Ahead of its time? Probably not, but I built some cool things on top of it

[vbezhenar]

Right now I'm writing adapter so people could call one SOAP service using simpler interfaces. That involves implementing WS-Security with non-standard algorithms, that also involves dealing with things like XML escaped into a string and embedded inside another XML.

Let's say I hope for the day I'll miss SOAP. Right now I have too much of it.

[pfraze]

atproto's lexicon-based rpc is pretty soap-like

[fc417fc802]

It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done? I don't think anyone who considers it obsolete has an informed opinion on the matter.

Typically a more primitive (sorry, minimal) format such as JSON is sufficient in which case there's no excuse to overcomplicate things. But sometimes JSON isn't sufficient and people start inventing half baked solutions such as JSON-LD for what is already a solved problem with a mature tech stack.

XSLT remains an elegant and underused solution. Guile even includes built in XML facilities named SXML.

[coldtea]

>It's not the hot new thing but when has hype ever mattered for getting shit done?

People who wanted to "get shit done" had much better alternatives. XML grew out of hype, corporate management forcing it, and bundling to all kinds of third party products and formats just so they can tick the "have this hot new format support" box.

[mycall]

It makes me wonder how well an LLM like Opus can generate XSLT which was always the hard part when writing by hand.

[vlovich123]

For me, even when it was first released, I considered obsolete enterprise shit. That view has not diminished as the sorry state of performance and security in that space has just reaffirmed that perception.

[cyanydeez]

20 years old means 1980!

[eduction]

Obsolete enterprise shit I guess includes podcasting. Impressive for the enterprise.

I’d be very curious what lasting open formats JSON has been used to build.

[coldtea]

That the podcast feed format is XML based is an insignificant detail - and a remnant of the past, nobody cares about.

People upload their podcasts to a platform like Apple Music or Spotify or Substack and co, or to some backend connected to their Wordpress/Ghost/etc) and it spits the RSS behind the scenes, with nobody giving a shit about the XML part.

Might as well declare USSR a huge IT success because people still play Tetris.

[himata4113]

didn't know html was spooky tech, TIL. /s

[coldtea]

HTML predates XML by 5 years.

What's more, the web standards bodies even abandoned a short-lived XML-hype-era plan to make a new version of HTML based on XML in 2009.

That from this touted to the heavens format a handful of uses remain (some companies still using SOAP, the MS Office monster schemas, RSS, EPUB, and so on) is the very opposite of the adoption it was supposed to have. For those that missed the 90s/early 00s, XML was a hugely hyped format, with enormous corporate adoption between 1999–2005, which deflated totally.

Did you also learned those things too today?