&gt; … 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.<p>You don&#x27;t remember the coming-out party for Java?<p>It&#x27;s really sad: we could have had Lisp and s-expressions; instead we ended up with Java &amp; XML, and now we have JavaScript and JSON (which go from bad to better in terms of usability, but bad to worse in terms of safety and stability).