Technology

I always try to ask what problem is being solved.

Is it having a universal parser? Actually xml kind of did solve that problem. You could easily exchange data without having to write a parser and as long as the data was mostly text, it was fine.

But that's all it solved. It made it so you didn't have to write a new parser. You still had to figure out on a schema to serialize and deserialize though. And you needed to parse non-scalars.