the "XML revolution"

judging from what i've read online over time, it is my understanding that XML was a major turning point for programming. everyone went crazy over it, everyone was trying to reinvent the wheel using it, it was the AI or cryptocurrencies of its time. my question is why? can someone who was old enough to remember explain to me what was so revolutionary about XML? it's just a markup language, and they certainly had markup languages before XML, no?(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf.)

In my understanding, it coincided with the "Java revolution" and the "web 2.0 revolution". Everybody and his mom wad doing these because it was "the future" and a lot of money was certainly made thanks to them.

i dont think xml had the hype of crypto because social media wasn't there yet to give a platform to tech bro marketing. That said xml is nice because its easy to read and parse. You cant be certain your program is bugfree so its very useful to be able to read the file raw and manually verify the program output is identical to file content. Secondary its probably the first widespread public standard to format files. This is huge for cooperation. It's a fuarrrking pain to decipher some of the file formats windows created but xml? Trivial. You can write a parser for it as a weekend project from scratch. Next comes what previous poster wrote - as people joined the internet they all started making their own websites and html is a xml language. So anyone remotely inclined to coding would be already familiar with xml format through html and receptive to use it outside the webbrowser in the same manner. Personally i didnt even know xml was a thing when i saw it, i learned html and saw someone else using it and though oh i already know how to read this looks like someone did his own html format which gave me the idea i should do it too so others can read my files same way - only found out way later on wikipedia that xml was a thing.

>Basically, XML is just another way of writing S-expressions or trees—or whatever you want to call it. They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living; rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs; torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-expressions. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.

>>41206 HTML is very importantly not an XML language. It is an SGML language, same as XML. This has reaching consequences in terms of how loose the syntax could be, and is why people attempted to make XHTML the standard. This failed because people hated that XHTML would error on invalid syntax while HTML just "chugs along". >>41202 Comparing XML to crypto is fairly wild, truth be told. Also unlike crypto, XML had clear and obvious use cases that allowed it to be quickly adopted. It was one of the few standardized markup languages of the era, and SGML based markup languages still supports features entirely absent from canonical specifications of other markup languages. Chiefly schema validation and user defined data types, not to say that such features don't carry their own warts and challenges. But at the end of the day XML, more than anything else, came pretty early. It also had the attention of the committees behind standardizing application interaction on the world wide web. So it, alongside HTML, were brought forward as the primary canonical options. SGML itself is from the 80s, and was one of the first fully standardized markup languages. Everything we work with in the modern day is built upon those that came before, it didn't come out of the void.

>>41218 "more strict" is insignificant in practical application of switching from one to another. Did i avoid strict cause i was lazy? Sure but its still true that html gave intuitively an understanding how xml works.

>>41219 My point was that factually speaking, HTML is not derived from XML at all. They are both drrived from SGML, a standard from the 1980s. Being wrong in order to "intuitively explain" only sets bad habits. Additionally, HTML does not properly express validation schemas, tag-validity, or many other concepts inherent to XML. Even its syntax is different (the "<tag/>" empty element is invalid HTML, not like a parser would care). It is the loose and messy SGML derivative, for better and for worse. But it is important to note it as independent of XML. In fact, look to XHTML to see what HTML would look like if it was XML, since thats exactly what XHTML is.

>>41237 My point was html made you think you knew xml and thus more accepting compared to facing a new completely foreign concept. Perception shapes decisions regardless of whether they are correct or not. People generally get stuck in sunk cost and fight "my soykaf is better" wars resisting tech stack changes because the underlying cause is unwillingness to discard your already invested time. Perceived familiarity therefore is important factor for adoption.