Hacker News Reader

> Imagine if we had only one way of doing data transfer between computer systems.

Well, that would be deeply inadequate and people would have to invent more of them?

I am curious what use cases triggered the development of XML for example.

This roughly covers it: https://ccollins.wordpress.com/2008/03/03/a-brief-history-of... - I hadn't realised SGML was quite so old, though.

> At it’s core, XML allows a software engineer the ability to create a vocabulary, and use this vocabulary to describe data.

The lols. This is so good to read that XML allows that.