Gregory's Server@mudkip So, back in the Aughts, when XML was going to take over the world, I went looking for usable XML parsers and found basically nothing. There were lots of things that claimed to be XML parsers, but they were all things that transformed a stream of characters into a stream of tokens that corresponded to kinds of things in the XML spec. What I wanted was a DOM for arbitrary XML, and nobody was doing that in any language I cared about. I eventually gave up, and then JSON took over the world.
@mudkip I remember when TimBL was pushing Semantic Web stuff and how we'd have self-describing documents that could be understood by intelligent agents that would go out onto the web and do our bidding, and structured document editors that would make it easy to write these things without getting down in the markup weeds, all based on XML. Instead we pass around programs in a Turing-complete language that sometimes generate syntactically correct documents with basically no semantics at all.