But the order you recite to support this description is the same order as in my description you are responding to. What does “backwards” mean to you?
> by opening up the scope of XML to more or less all of SGML, it is much less "of the web" than HTML was.
It's true that XML covers about the entire semantic space of SGML, but it deliberately does so with a much smaller syntactic space, inspired largely by HTML in its approach.
To say it wasn't “of the web” ignores the history of inspiration, development, standardization, and use.
> I was working with and paying attention to markup schemes and languages from the mid-80s. At the time XML emerged, I remember a giant collective yawn from that side of the software world, precisely because it just seemed that W3C had decided to embrace-but-not-really-extend SGML.
Yeah, and like the famous Slashdot CmdrTaco response to the iPod (“No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”), that response missed what was relevant in the real world completely, XML (as bad a reputation for heavyweight implementations as it has compared to some more modern data representations), while in principal an application of SGML is much lighter weight to implement tooling for and a much smaller conceptual space for humans to understand (traits it shared with its inspiration, HTML.)
Progress isn't always by extension, it's often by recognizing and eliminating what is superfluous to requirements.
“It seems that perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint Exupéry