[meepmorp]

I remember a meeting where a consultant from an MCP excitedly told our mutual client that the XP in the upcoming version of Windows stood for 'XML Protocol.'

More innocent times.

[lowercased]

I had a power strip which had "works with windows 95" on the packaging box.

[dylan604]

This is just an example of how marketing knows nothing about the products they are marketing, or are just flat out snake oil sales. Like packaging for bacon exclaiming "gluten free"

[print_goto_ten]

>This is just an example of how marketing knows nothing about the products they are marketing

Or it is a question that people who are not familiar with technology will ask frequently and makes no sense to people who are.

[mgkimsal]

I use bing, and tell people to 'bing it' sometimes (instead of 'google it').

I had a family member ask "will bing work with my yahoo?"

So... I know those words individually, but... man... together, in that order... I don't know how to respond. I think I said something like "don't worry about it - it's not that big a deal" and left it at that.

[recursive]

I mean... but it is? They're not wrong. Either the marketing works or it doesn't, but it's not false. If it works, then it's good marketing. If it doesn't, then the marketers don't know their market.

[Joker_vD]

Ah yes, "this cereal is asbestos-free!" kind of marketing. It's on the same page with non-GMO salt.

[dylan604]

Exactly. It doesn't really matter that the claim is technically true, it just has no bearing whatsoever on the product itself.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Wow, and I thought my headphones from 1998 that said "MP3 Ready" on the package were stupid.

[cglace]

Did it work with 98?

[lowercased]

I wasn't working at the same place in 1998, so I can't verify.

The hype around Windows 95 at the time was... incredible. Midnight store openings, hours-long line waits... insanity.

[kcplate]

> The hype around Windows 95 at the time was... incredible.

I left one job for another in 1994 simply because the new company had access to the windows Chicago beta program (and it was a 20% salary bump). But the main reason for me choosing g that org was the beta, because I had other offers with similar salary bumps at the same time.

[adamgordonbell]

Scala had XML literals as part of the language!

Apparently Philip Wadler was the person who told them needed it, because the future was XML.

( Walder is big Haskell/PL person)

[bryik]

That's surprising! Wasn't it Philip Wadler who said "The essence of XML is this: the problem it solves is not hard, and it does not solve the problem well."

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/

[taeric]

The irony, to me, is how it is viewed as a bit of a mistake that they had XML in Scala. Hard to square that with how instrumental JSX was in getting some of the modern JavaScript frameworks as far as it has.

[hajile]

If the web spec had a JSON analog for HTML, I think you'd see a lot less love for JSX.

[taeric]

Maybe? Though, I suspect JSX just got lucky with when it got popular. There were plenty of mixed HTML/Script things in the past. Most of them met a lot of resistance.

[tracker1]

ActionScript 3 as well as the E4X support in Mozilla's Browser+JS/XUL engine for a while (removed now afaik).

Around that time it was pretty nice passing around XML, as I was forced to work with VB.Net which also had an XML literal syntax on the backend and Flash/AS3 on the UI.

I had built a POC with E4X that was VERY similar to React/Redux over a decade before React, but the other browser vendors didn't have it... At the time IE and Chrome were shifting towards JSON.

[orthoxerox]

VB.NET still has them. I remember doing a project with an XML database (ugh) back in college when the version with the literals was released. I was ecstatic.

[tuukkah]

Was it far from JSX?

[chimeracoder]

It was almost literally JSX (except with Scala syntax instead of Javascript, of course).

An XML literal in Scala would have been:

  // XML literals (to be dropped)
  val mails1 = for (from, to, heading, body) <- todoList yield
    <message>
      <from>{from}</from><to>{to}</to>
      <heading>{heading}</heading><body>{body}</body>
    </message>
  println(mails1)

This was replaced with "XML string interpolation", which

  // XML string interpolation
  val mails2 = for (from, to, heading, body) <- todoList yield xml"""
    <message>
      <from>${from}</from><to>${to}</to>
      <heading>${heading}</heading><body>${body}</body>
    </message>"""
  println(mails2)