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Comment by niftich | Hacker News Reader

I chuckled at:

> If you help build something important and impactful, call it X, it's easy to slip into year after year of being the world’s greatest expert on X, and when X isn't important and impactful any more, you're in a bad place.

He, of course, was co-author of the XML spec.

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Gosling, who he quotes at the top of the article, worked on NeWS, a primary competitor to X. And, I imagine he knows plenty of people who literally worked on X, since he worked at multiple major UNIX vendors during that period.

X is also Java in Gosling's case. ;-)

And X is also Emacs [1] and Andrew [2] in Gosling's case. ;-)

For Tim Bray, X is short for XML.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs

[2] https://www.cmu.edu/news/archive/2009/November/nov5_goslingr...

XML is still used all over the place; it's not exactly one foot in the grave.

Yeah, but the common XML stack of technologies doesn't show up in job announcements anymore. (XSLT, XSD).

Often people are maintaining code that is built on top of XML.

99% of advertised jobs with XSL, XSDT, UML, etc never actually required them for day to day work.

XML is still huge in corp land. In Healthcare, HL7 is gradually moving to an XML version. SOAP is everywhere, JSON is not. Horses for courses.

Getting somewhat far afield of the OP, but in healthcare, the bigger trend seems to be a move from HL7v2 past the dumpster fire that was XML-based HL7v3 to JSON-based FHIR.

They'll turn json into a dumpster fire to, it's just tradition at this point.

I think xml with it's great validation and inter-operability is still the best choice for something like HL7 though.

I just used XSLT for user edited SVG sanitization (whitelisting of elements and attributes) and I'm still in a shock how easy was it. I'll miss XML

Was it JWZ who said, the problem XML solves is not hard, and XML solves it badly?

But not as generically badly as SGML!

Didn't he say something about how it's just a job for regular expressions ;-)

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