I&#x27;m sure others who have been around longer remember other examples, but in my life I have never before or since witnessed a media blitz for a &quot;technical&quot; standard as the coming out party for XML in the &#x27;90s. Almost overnight the book shelves, magazines (yes those were both things back then), and even TV news proclaimed the dawn of the new age. A wave incoherent mass insanity swept the industry with the promise that this sometimes white space sensitive text data format with all the deliberate under and over specifications that are hallmark traits of design by committee was literally going to solve every problem in software engineering, enterprise IT, and of course investing in the dot com dumpster fire (pre first collapse). The emperor never had any clothes. Disk space, network capacity, cpu time, sanity, dignity - mattered not. No problem could not be solved better with XML. Dissension was heretical.<p>Any one else remember that?