The XML spec is 25 years old today
XML was supposed to be a silver bullet of the myriad of ad-hoc formats for structuring documents that existed in the wild pre 2000(I got this information contested here, but that&#x27;s what an old professor told me).<p>In the XML &quot;stack&quot; you can find the XSL to ensure the validity of an XML document, the XPath to be a querying language, the XSLT to be a language for writing transformations, etc. I think one must at least respect XML stack vision of coherence and completeness.<p>Then you have things like JSON where the whole wheel is being reinvented, in my opinion, for no clear purpose. You have for instance hundreds of libraries for creating a JSON schema and everything looks like a waste of time overall.<p>Before anyone asks me, yes I have used JSON and YAML and I never could really understand why people keep recreating basic stuff like markup languages instead of sticking to whatever is available. And yes, verbosity because of the XML tag system always sounded a pretty silly argument to me.