Between my peer c-suites, the conversation is that GCP cannot even be in the consideration set until such a time as a several-year period has elapsed without this kind of incident.

Similarly, I could see ransomware groups hacking in and feeling bad for GH so they improve a few things to help them get to at leave nine fives of uptime.

First, there is modeling ambiguity, too many ways to represent the same data structure. Which means you can’t parse into native structs but instead into a heavy DOM object and it sucks to interact with it.

Then, schemas sound great, until you run into DTD, XSD, and RelaxNG. Relax only exists because XSD is pretty much incomprehensible.

Then let’s talk about entity escaping and CDATA. And how you break entire parsers because CDATA is a separate incantation on the DOM.

And in practice, XML is always over engineered. It’s the AbstractFactoryProxyBuilder of data formats. SOAP and WSDL are great examples of this, vs looking at a JSON response and simply understanding what it is.

I worked with XML and all the tooling around it for a long time. Zero interest in going back. It’s not the angle brackets or the serialization efficiency. It’s all of the above brain damage.

2 days later...

Same story in crypto. There will be shock and awe when Binance falls and plenty of people saying “real crypto has never been tried”.