[qsort]

If you replace XML with JSON and PDAs with phone apps he's spot on.

"Truly powerful applications can be built using combinations of JavaScript and XML"

"XML can be used to mediate between Database row-based output, asynchronous message records, and other types of business forms and data."

"Business-based TXP systems of the future will need to incorporate XML as part of their backbone services technology. The ability to read and understand an XML description of an incoming record or object, and the ability to easily generate XML to describe an outbound record or object, will be a major requirement for system-to-system, business-to-business transaction processing. Intelligent browsers will have XML built in, allowing XML to be used bi-directionally all the way up and down the business hierarchy: from PDAs to PCs to Web/App Servers to Transaction processors."

[coldtea]

The difference being that JSON doesn't have the pretentiousness, mental, tooling and processing overhead, and the marketing-imposed-solution-of-a-non-problem XML was sold as...

[qsort]

Oh absolutely. XML and HTML are the epitome of trying to solve a problem that's not very hard, and not solving it very well.

S-expressions reinvented badly.

JSON does have the same problem at its core, but at least it's simple and the data structures it offers (dicts and lists) are semi-reasonable primitives.