[civilized]

I found the discussion flat-out silly. It basically says something is only "self-describing" if it's an HTML blob, but in the example given, the JSON blob is actually easier to understand.

Sure, you can run the HTML through a browser and it looks nicer, but who cares? You can also render a JSON blob with a slightly different set of rules. And if we don't bother with the rendering on either side, it remains just as obvious what the JSON means.

If these people wanted their ideas to stand the rest of time, rather than merely the acronyms, they should have had better ideas.