Comment by rhdunn

6 hours ago

XML is used a lot in standards and publishing industries -- JATS, EPUB, ODF, DOCX/XLSX/..., DocBook, etc. are all XML based/use XML.

7 comments

rhdunn

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coldtea  4 hours ago

Yes, there's a handful of niches. Still 1/1000th the momentum it had, or adoption it was expected to get, and nobody under 40 even considers it for new stuff.

michaelbarton  6 hours ago

Without being facetious, isn’t HTML a dialect of XML and very widely used?

  • Twisol  6 hours ago

    HTML is actually a dialect of SGML. XHTML was an attempt to move to an XML-based foundation, but XML's strictness in parsing worked against it, and eventually folks just standardized how HTML parsers should interpret ill-formed HTML instead.

  • vitejose  6 hours ago

    No, HTML was historically supposed to be a subset of SGML; XML is also an application of SGML. XHTML is the XML version of HTML. As of HTML5, HTML is no longer technically SGML or XML.

  • phlakaton  4 hours ago

    HTML is far loosier-goosier in its syntax than XML allows. There was an attempt to nail its syntax down in the pre-HTML 5 days; that's XHTML. When HTML 5 pivoted away from that, that spelled the end of these two things ever coming together.

    Really, I think you can trace a lot of the "XML is spooky old technology" mindset to the release of HTML 5. That was when XML stopped being directly relevant to the web, though of course it still lives on in many other domains and legacy web apps.

graemep  5 hours ago

Also in finance. XBRL and FIXML although I do not know how widely used the latter is.