James Clark: XML vs the Web.
You should read the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion:
So what’s the way forward? I think the Web community has spoken, and it’s clear that what it wants is HTML5, JavaScript and JSON. XML isn’t going away but I see it being less and less a Web technology; it won’t be something that you send over the wire on the public Web, but just one of many technologies that are used on the server to manage and generate what you do send over the wire.
My take on XML is that Microsoft and IBM and Software AG and all the other big software vendors took a technology that was originally a simplification of something that had grown over complicated (SGML) and saddled it with layer upon layer of complexity, because then they could sell tools to manage that complexity. In the meantime, people that needed to get stuff done and didn’t have huge budgets for tools moved on to less complicated technologies.
[update] I should probably add that XML is still very useful and won’t go away any time soon, and I don’t regret the effort I’ve put into learning XML technologies. But there’s a lot of junk built on XML—SOAP, UDDI, WS-*, etc.—that could (and should) die unmourned.
I wonder whether another way to put it might be that vendors like IBM or Software AG add complexity that lets them solve the the problems of their customers. But, by their nature, their customers tend to have complex problems (else they would have solved them more cheaply).
That acting only for the good (as they experience it), they will still drive tools toward solving the highly complex problems that merit hiring a vendor like that.
“The Innovator’s Dilemma” (which more or less inspired this notion) points out that companies often lose out on new markets _because_ it doesn’t fit the needs of their existing customer base. I think this might be similar.
I still had the sense that a lot of this was much more complicated than it needed to be, even for the big enterprise customers big software vendors target. The overcomplication may not have been intentional, but it was real.