XML Side-story

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) was developed in response to fears in the 1990s that software developers would run out of acronyms by the year 2010.

How it works

To solve the problem, XML provides a standard for namespaces , whereby the letters in an acronym could be arbitrarily assigned to any letter in a spelled-out word. Thus, Extensible Markup Language became “XML”, not “EML”, which was already trademarked by a gangsta rap artist.

Note

Acronyms are what separate us from the apes.

Furthermore, namespaces allow hierarchical lists of acronyms to be built without collisions—XML includes XSLT (Extensible Style Sheet Transformation Language, or E-S-S-T-L, really), XSD (Extensible Markup Language Schema Definition Language, or E-M-L-S-D-L), XPath (Extensible Markup Language Path Language, or E-M-L-P-L), SAX (Simple Application Programming Interface for Extensible Markup Language Processing, or S-A-P-I-E-M-L-P), JAX (Java Application Programming Interface for Extensible Markup Language Processing, or J-A-P-I-E-M-L-P), and XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, E-H-M-L which is easier to say than X-H-T-M-L).

Besides, everyone at the W3C agreed that adding “X” to anything makes it cool like Vin Diesel.

So what is XML really? All this hoo-ha is about two things: thing one is “<”; thing two is “>”. By putting < > around everything, you make it vastly harder to type thereby raising the bar for programmers and decreasing the likelihood ...

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