Towards an XML-free future, reflection

I was introduced to the digital humanities through XML. Therefore, "Towards an XML-free future for the digital humanities" shocked me when I first read it. Digital humanities without XML sounded like gluten-free bagels or vegan meatloaf. But now I've had time to digest it, and I have a new appreciation for Desmond Schmidt's argument. In short, XML is losing its foothold among "real" programmers, and soon digital humanists will be forced to follow "real" programmers as they migrate over to REST or JSON.

Conal Tuohy, Paul Ryan, and Michael Kay all raise a common objection in the comments: JSON might be better at messaging between programs but XML seems to remain the standard of human-readable documents. This controversy inspires two stages of reflection in me:

1. At first, I agreed heartily with Desmond Schmidt. I abandoned a plan for an XML-based Shakespeare class because, in conversation with H. Lewis Ulman, I decided that the "human readable" XML imposed so many constraints that it would distract from my learning objectives. Instead, my students work in traditional text editors (or collaborate in Google docs), and I transform their output in Scalar.
2. The truth is that I'm strategically agnostic about this debate. I'm committed to Scalar in the near-term, and Scalar serializes API results as either RDF-XML or RDF-JSON. Ultimately, I don't care whether the bagels have gluten or not, as long as I get my schmear.