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Comment by varjag | Hacker News Reader

We can only thank the millennials for killing the whole XML tech stack for good. That and blood diamonds industry.

It's far from dead, though. XML is deeply ingrained in many industries and stacks, and will remain so for decades to come, probably until something better than JSON comes along.

Yes, kind of like COBOL. Dead.

You have no idea. New projects with XML-based formats and interfaces are being implemented all the time. XML isn’t going anywhere.

There was fresh COBOL code written up until early 1990s too, long past its heyday.

Thing is you couldn't swing a dead cat in 00s without hitting XML. Nearly every job opening had XML listed in requirements. But since mid-2010s you can live your entire career without the need to work on anything XML-related.

Apple’s operating systems to this day make heavy use of XML by way of plists. You can’t have an app without it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_list

I guess? Although in the few iOS/watchOS apps I made I never edited it manually.

But it’s still there and needs to be supported by the OS and tooling. Wether you edit it manually isn’t relevant (and as counterpoint, I do it all the time, for both apps and launchd agents).

Of course it's there. Expecting all the stuff laid in 00s disappear overnight would be unrealistic.

COBOL code is also still there.

There's still epub and tons of other standards built on xml and xhtml. Ironically, the last epub file I downloaded, a comic book from humble bundle, had a 16mb css file composed entirely of duplicate definitions of the same two styles, and none of it was needed at all (set each page and image to the size of the image itself, basically)

On the web. I, among other things, make Android apps, and Android and XML are one and the same. There is no such thing as Android development without touching XML files.

Flutter? React Native? Maui?

None of that is what I would call "Android development".

But even if you use one of those terrible technologies, your app still needs a manifest and some native resources.

I did Android Developer Challenge back in 2008 and honestly don't remember doing that much of XML. Although it is the technology from peak XML days so perhaps you're right.

RSS, MusicXML, SVG, Docbook, Epub, JATS, XMP, ...

Sorry, web frontend is not the "whole XML tech stack", despite popular belief.

And yes all of the above are mainstream in their respective industry.

Some of it deserved to die, mostly because it was misused.

I don’t know how many times I had to manually write <![CDATA[ … ]]>

I know all markup languages have their quirks, XML could be come impressively complex and inscrutable.

It has, I think, one nice feature that few markups I use these days have: every node is strongly-typed, which makes things like XSLT much cleaner to implement (you can tell what the intended semantics of a thing is so you aren't left guessing or hacking it in with __metadata fields).

... but the legibility and hand-maintainability was colossally painful. Having to tag-match the closing tags even though the language semantics required that the next closing tag close the current context was an awful, awful amount of (on the keyboard) typing.

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