"Serve your app as XML"
As someone who started his professional career in 2005: All the old is new again.
As someone who started his professional career in 2005: All the old is new again.
Serious randomness is induced by the decisions of whatever entities happen to be influential, typically (but not exclusively) by having the most successful economic model. Causally that earnings model need not be at all related with the tech. After all, most 'big tech' is not actually selling the tech itself.
People mostly code for money so they are attracted and incentivized to use the more visible money-making conventions (be part of wining teams) irrespective of particular technical merit.
But there are additional more objective dimensions that complicate things. E.g. SPA conventions did solve a user experience problem at the time. It was not pure lemming behavior. In retrospect we know that it could have been solved otherwise but at that time we didn't.
There's a really nice binary XML format that browsers haven't implemented yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficient_XML_Interchange
The developer experience was amazing, you could easily inspect the data backing any page. XSLT was hard but probably easier than React these days.
Custom elements, client side templating, form validation against schemas, they had it all and threw it away.
<body myattr="yeah">
<thing>hi</thing>
<thing thingattr="cool">hi2</thing>
<otherkindathing>hi2</otherkindathing>
</body>
{"type": "body", "attrs": {"myattr": "yeah"},
"children": [{"type": "thing", "content": "hi"}, ...]}/j
PS won on human readability and editability but lost on portability to Adobe's own internal competitor, PDF, and because it fought and lost to (La)TeX -> PDF & (La)TeX -> DVI -> PS.
PS: I once printed out and bound the PDF 1.3 spec[0] on 24 lbs. bleached dead trees on an HP LaserJet IIIP with over a million page count. Some of the nuclear engineers and scientists an office containing <50 people routinely printed thousand page documents every week.
0. https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...
In all seriousness, everything in JSON can be expressed as XML; but not necessarily the other way around.
Like that time there were hundreds of forms to build, refused, held a silent protest until a reasonable way presented itself.
Enter "XML Form Template" or "XML Form Definition.", A form is generated from the XML in html, filled in, and on submit, the XML is filled back in.
Built one form renderer and done. Never got old watching it.
XForms (W3C standard)
XML makes sense for open-ended, human-written things like documents or apps. It doesn't work so well for APIs and other machine-read/written things where you'd normally use JSON.