What just happened!?
The whole transfer syntax story just went meta, that's what happened!
XML has been a runaway success, on a much greater scale than its designers anticipated
- Not for the reason they had hoped
- Because separation of form from content is right
- But for a reason they barely thought about
Tree structured documents are a useable transfer syntax for just about anything
- So data-oriented web users think of XML as a transfer mechanism for their data