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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

May 2001: “XML: the universal language?” https://www.computerweekly.com/feature/XML-the-universal-lan...

I recall a Wired article from the same era. “XML means your doctor’s system can just talk to the hospital system even though they’re different!”

Hasn’t happened yet... will it? Can it?

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> Hasn’t happened yet... will it? Can it?

Nope. XML (or Json, etc.) are just "human-readable" presentation of data. It does not provides any semantic whatsoever.

So you need some semantic on top of these data. And a general-purpose, universal API is yet to be invented (hint: it is probably not feasible)

Microsoft and others enterprise selling vendors loved the end goal back in early 2000s - the universal API solved by middleware. That's why you had Biztalk and Biztalk consultants that made more than SAP consultants (think todays crazy Salesfarce consultants that compete for gamification badges). For example you could be a small insurance company submitting to a larger underwriter, and when you work out the transactions per month you have to take $5 off each app just to pay for biztalk infrastructure and licensing. People rode that gravy train hard. I'd be surprise if any of the biztalk shit still remained though, grand goals means juice enterprise sales. Oracle had a similarly crap product that was equally slow, painful and verbose, can't recall the name. XML and it's lofty goals beyond what it was can be compared to today's ICO toxic industry, no reflection on XML itself though.

In the 80's, it was EDI -- electronic data interchange, a set of schemes for sending binary formatted business data, like invoices and POs.

Don't forget HL7

The "badges" are not won in competions, but instead watered down tutorial gold stars. Instead of targeting real programmers Salesforce built "trailhead" for John in finance who wrote some Excel macro and decided he should become a Salesforce "developer". Thats why the small percentage of us consultants who actually come from a cs background can charge so much.

I think I agree with your sentiment, but I'd think you'd be surprised how much a click next salesfarce developer charges...

Of course it's feasible. It's called English!

Quoi? ("...fetchez la vache!!!")

I read a great article about XML that spelled out that XML isn't a "language" or protocol, it's an "alphabet". It gives you the building blocks but what you build with it but it doesn't translate from one language to another. (I guess that's what XSLT is meant to do but it's still not magic.)

JSON? And no doubt in another ten years, something else!

Luckily, the English language never changes. Wait.

But compared to the rate of change in technology, it's practically written in stone!

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