I've often heard that everyone needs a hobby.

I have lots of hobbies that I pursue to varying degrees of fanaticism. Some I
tire of and never look at again after an initial burst of interest, some of them
I pursue on the periphery (which is probably more accurately described as a
'passing interest'), and some of them I look at, then ignore for a long time,
and then jump back into them with renewed zeal. XML is an example of the latter
kind.

I went to college in the late 90's and early 00's (the longer I stayed as an
active student, the longer I could put off actually having to pay for my
schooling). And one of the classes I took dealt with markup languages,
specifically HTML, XHTML, and XML. I thought XML was pretty interesting, but had
a kind of a hard time wrapping my head around it, but I got enough done that I
passed the class, and then I promptly stopped thinking about XML again until a
few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago, for lack of anything else better to do, I was scouring YouTube
for interesting things to watch, and, for no reason that I can divine, XML
popped into my head as something to search for. Most of the videos I found were
old, poorly done, explained things awkwardly (or left out big chunks of
information) and so on. So I dug further.

I found that the XML specification hadn't seen any significant updates since
2008, and concepts that I was trying to dust the cobwebs off of in my mind, like
XSLT hadn't seen many significant updates in years (with the exception of XSLT
3, which apparently became a W3C recommendation in 2017, which was 10 years
after XSLT 2.0 (https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/)).

All of that was weird, but I forged ahead anyway. I got a 'Learning XML' book to
refresh my memory, read it, and decided on a personal project that uses XML. The
details aren't important, and, yes, I'm sure that your favorite programming
language/markup language/pet project/script/whatever would do a better
job/be a better fit/and so on, but I've already decided to do it using XML.

So, I read the book, and I created a couple of documents, and I tried using XSLT
to transform a document into XHTML using FireFox and... it didn't work. I mean,
I got the data out of the document, but none of the formatting would work. I
tried in Chrome (since this was on a work computer (if anyone asks, I'm using
the work computer to (re)learn XML for a work project), and got nothing, a.k.a.
a blank page was my result. That sent me down another path of browser support
for XML.

I had assumed that, like a lot of things I learned about in school, that XML was
one of those things that could be used for a lot of different purposes. That it
was going to be the way of the future of the so-called 'Semantic Web', and so
on, and I just hadn't heard anything about it because I wasn't paying attention
to it.

It turns out, though, that for a lot of people on the Web, XML is a dead
technology. I've read through lots of docs and criticisms and screeds and rants
about XML. XML is hard to use, XML doesn't make sense, XML is too verbose, XML
is a solution in search of a problem, and so on. 

I found that XSLT doesn't work when I'm browsing my local filesystem because
Google has tried to strip out XSLT from Chrome
(https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/zIg2KC7PyH0%5B1-25%5D). 

Twice
(https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/6MOMhQaX3N8). 

They haven't managed to do it yet, but they have managed to change Chrome so
that it can't perform XSLT transformations on local files in the name of
security (even though the stars would have to align in such a way that leaking
XML data via an XSLT transformation that the odds of it happening are so remote
that it effectively doesn't happen (as evidenced by the fact that it hasn't
happened, unless I missed all those news stories of the great XSLT heist))
(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3828898/can-chrome-be-made-to-perform-an-xsl-transform-on-a-local-file/34439925#34439925)

So, that's a bummer, sure, but not a showstopper, at least not yet.

I'm sure that once Google decides to get too big for its breeches again that it
will make another push to eliminate XSLT support from Chrome entirely. That's
not a huge issue for me, since I don't really use Chrome much outside of work,
where I *have* to use it for certain things. The problem will be that once they
finally get around to axing support, that FireFox will follow suit (because
that's what they do), and then the only major browser with XSLT support is going
to be Edge, for however long that lasts (if Chrome and FireFox remove XSLT
support, then it's only a matter of time before Edge does the same). 

Web browsers are going to do what they're going to do, and it doesn't matter
what little ol' me thinks about things. They build software for people who don't
know how technology works, and have no interest in learning. But it goes deeper
than that.

I like XML precisely because it's not HTML.

HTML and HTTP are consuming the Internet piece by piece, and it doesn't take a
genius to see the writing on the wall. HTML and HTTP are consuming the web
because the web browser has become the de facto gateway into the Internet. Where
we once had a myriad of technologies presenting information in slightly
different ways depending on the content, now we just cram them all into a CMS
behind a Cloudflare instance and call it a day. It doesn't matter that HTML and
HTTP may not be the best way to present the content, but we've reached a
critical mass where it's the only way anyone will ever see it, even though
that's getting less and less true as time goes on since web apps are eating the
web, and may eventually, essentially *be* the Internet for the majority of people. 

But I'm going to do my part, for as long as it's feasible. 

I'm going to present plain text where it makes sense. I'm going to use plain
HTML with no JavaScript where it makes sense. I'm going to use XML where it
makes sense (even though some would probably argue that it *never* makes sense,
but we're not talking about that here). I'm going to visit IRC when I want to
chat with people. I'm going to use email via a real email client. I'm going to
visit my friends' home pages in whatever browser I want, and I'm going to keep
making my own home page be just stuff I find interesting or useful, or just
stuff that I feel needs to exist in a form where anyone can get at it. 

I'm going to keep the promises of the early web alive for myself for as long as
I can. The promises that anyone can put up anything they want with a little bit
of effort, and they can then share that content with the world on their own
terms. I'm not going to do it on Facebook's terms or Twitter's terms or Google's
terms or Mozilla's terms or anybody else's, because it's not their Internet.
It's *our* Internet. They don't have the power, we, the users do. 

Or, at least we did. We, as users, may have ceeded too much power to the
Internet megacorps to reverse course now, but I'll continue doing my part to
keep as many of the so-called 'outdated' technologies around for as long as I
can.