I remember being excited when XML hit 1.0 (as a new programmer this seemed like a huge advance over things like classic Unix configuration files), and progressively disappointed over the next decade as the promise not only wasn’t delivered on.
The things which killed XML seem to me to be related to the old standards culture: the people involved assumed adoption was inevitable and distracted themselves with increasingly arcane thickets of new standards, with the assumption that someone else would spend time on the “boring” work of building professional-quality tools and documentation or cleaning up usability warts. That other 80% of the work never happened and most people who had a choice moved on.
As a thought experience, imagine if libxml2 had had even a single dedicated developer focused on tracking standards or making usability improvements, instead of training multiple generations of users that XML was slow and hostile to users. Various XML committees’ travel expenses building standards which were never used likely cost more than that. Not leaving XPath frozen around the turn of the century would have helped in so many places.
The other wart I think would have made a surprising difference is the usability disaster around namespaces. So many tool developers forced users to switch between the short namespace:attribute form they used everywhere in the document and the {namespace url}attribute form that resolves to, or forced you to respecify the namespaces on every operation rather than reusing the values the parser had already loaded. Users begrudged that verbosity but they hated it when it meant something silently returned incorrect results because a selector using the document’s own syntax didn’t find the element they could see using those exact values. Absolutely nothing anyone did in the XML world was a better use of time than fixing that would have been since it trained people to think of XML-based tools as a painful, error-prone experience to be avoided — and they did as soon as they could.
The things which killed XML seem to me to be related to the old standards culture: the people involved assumed adoption was inevitable and distracted themselves with increasingly arcane thickets of new standards, with the assumption that someone else would spend time on the “boring” work of building professional-quality tools and documentation or cleaning up usability warts. That other 80% of the work never happened and most people who had a choice moved on.
As a thought experience, imagine if libxml2 had had even a single dedicated developer focused on tracking standards or making usability improvements, instead of training multiple generations of users that XML was slow and hostile to users. Various XML committees’ travel expenses building standards which were never used likely cost more than that. Not leaving XPath frozen around the turn of the century would have helped in so many places.
The other wart I think would have made a surprising difference is the usability disaster around namespaces. So many tool developers forced users to switch between the short namespace:attribute form they used everywhere in the document and the {namespace url}attribute form that resolves to, or forced you to respecify the namespaces on every operation rather than reusing the values the parser had already loaded. Users begrudged that verbosity but they hated it when it meant something silently returned incorrect results because a selector using the document’s own syntax didn’t find the element they could see using those exact values. Absolutely nothing anyone did in the XML world was a better use of time than fixing that would have been since it trained people to think of XML-based tools as a painful, error-prone experience to be avoided — and they did as soon as they could.