I had randomly run across some interesting (but highly geeky) XML quotes, and found this gem from Tim Bray:
Some of us really REALLY want to be able to deal with the bits on the wire and REALLY like the open-ness and interoperability that gives us. Others really REALLY want to take the bits on the wire away and present us instead with an API that has 117 entry points averaging 5 arguments and try to convince us that this is somehow equivalent. XML, for the first time in my professional career, represents a consensus on interoperability: that it is achieved by interchanging streams of characters with embedded markup. Since about 15 seconds after XML's release, the API bigots have been trying to recover from this terrible mistake and pretend that the syntax is ephemeral and the reality is the data structure, just read chapters 3 through 27 of the API spec, buy the programmer's toolkit, sign up for professional services and hey-presto, you'll be able to access your own data, isn't that wonderful!?!?
But you're not going to take the bits on the wire away from us without a huge messy noisy fight down to the last ditch.
— Tim Bray on the xml-dev mailing list, Thursday, 05 Dec 2002
