I've been using XML here and there for about 20 years now. It does have its uses. But I still don't have any idea what all that xmlns stuff is about, especially all the variations of it that involve colons. Like I know its something to do with namespaces or whatever. But to this day I open an XML file and in the first few lines there's a few xmlns pointing to some random complicated old urls and it just has this air of 'ignorable old overspecified thing because someone got too excited twenty years ago'<p>(except sometimes its not ignorable and then things get messy)<p>edit: yes I know what namespaces are for, and some of the simple uses are simple, but to try and understand xml namespaces and schemas in full is really complicated. 95% of the time this stuff just seems like fussy cruft.
ActionScript 3.0 was a great example of implementing E4X.<p>I miss that language a lot. It has quite a few great concepts: XML, intuitive implementation of objects, where key can be anything. Statically typed. Prototypes. Typed vectors. for..each loop. Dictionary with weak keys (oh that I loved so much, it was so powerful to implement better memory management on top of this).<p>I spent like 10 years developing in it, now it's my 6 year since I've touched it last time : (
Hey, I worked on the specification for this as a fresh out of school test engineer! Ah, the memories. It didn't take over the world, and in hindsight it should have worked a little differently, but I still think it's pretty neat. I haven't used it in a few years now but it is really easy to transform or extract data from an xml doc using Rhino and E4X.
Good ol’ E4X. It actually worked in Firefox, but I only ever used it in ActionScript. It was a little strange, but quite useful in some regards. There’s a bit more than just literals going on there.
Martin Odersky once mentioned that he added XML literal to Scala because it was 2000s (citation needed). Although it's hard to refrain from ridiculing these, it's probably not fair to do it. 2000s had its own collective craziness and this was one of them. We'll have such ones for 2020s but we can only spot it years later.<p>(Don't name it to show your smartness. Pointing a few is not hard, but pinpointing all is not possible unless you're a pure naysayer.)
Another example of language support for XML is VB.NET. I loved this feature when I last used it (over 10 years ago), especially the LINQ syntax for generating tags.<p><a href="https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/programming-guide/language-features/xml/xml-literals-overview" rel="nofollow">https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/visual-basic/program...</a>