You’re correct that I haven’t worked much with XML. Some light parsing, mostly. When I was a kid in the early 00s, I rewrote my personal website (which wasn’t anything terribly complex, maybe 10-20 pages) into XHTML. I remember thinking that it seemed overly complicated for no clear benefit.

The article resonated with me because it was addressing a fundamental challenge I deal with constantly: watching people make decisions that allow them to ship quickly, at the expense of future problems.