>Adam: That was it. That was the creation of JSON, which everyone is using today. But back then, everyone rejected it.
>In some ways it was a marketing problem. On one side, you had Doug, trying to convince customers that they can build interactive applications on the web using JavaScript and this simple thing called JSON. But on the other side, you had XML that had these big companies behind it, IBM, Microsoft, and big consultants. And later they even had some tech influencers like Dave Winer.
>Douglas: He’s someone who should have known better. He had a website called scripting.com. His style of scripting came from a clever program that he had written for the Macintosh called Frontier, in which he had a scripting language and an outliner and a word processor and a database, all in one program. And the idea was that you could do virtually anything in Frontier with a little bit of scripting. And he was also one of the big promoters of SOAP, the Simple Object Annoying Protocol.
>I don’t remember what the A was, but it might have been atrocious or abominable, I don’t know.
>But SOAP was a big deal at the time. They were right in wanting simplicity. They didn’t accomplish it, but they put simplicity in the name as sort of an aspirational thing. And so, when I started showing how JSON works, he was really threatened by that. And on his website, which was well-read at the time, he complained that, “this isn’t even XML. We should find who did this in string them up now”, which was a really ugly thing to say.
>Fortunately, nobody listens to Dave Winer, so I’m still here.
Dave's done some brilliant influential stuff, which Doug credits and I've written about before, but being annoying is Dave's brand, so Doug's "SOAP" joke is dead on. It's just as fair as referring to Marc Canter's "People Aggregator" as "People Aggravator".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20780928
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21170440
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16224154
https://www.gawker.com/183778/people-aggravator-marc-canter-...