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Abandoning XML is and continues to be the webs biggest mistake.

Client side templating, custom elements, validation against schemas, native databinding for forms, we could have had it all and threw it away; instead preferring to rebuild it over and over again in React until the end of time.

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It was actually a hypertext format as opposed to JSON. So HATEOS actually made sense. The fact that we went backwards in terms of no longer using a hyptertext format for almost all web requests is one of the dumbest moves in web development. I get the incentives that influenced it, but yuck.

If the web was being built today it would be nothing but Javascript and Canvas, the idea of something like HTML would have you laughed out of the room. Documents? You have PDF for that.

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