In 2018, the U.S. Navy released an administrative message, NAVADMIN 315/18, which laid out a plan to help the Navy migrate its IT footprint (on land and at sea) to cloud technologies and methodologies. The Navy inserted a separate mandate in this message, called out as its first of Four Key Pillars: Standardize all data onto XML. And not only "standardize on XML", but do that as a way of enforcing adoption of a format called EXI.1
Even had this been released in 2003, it would have been a bad idea. But it was 2018, "the cloud" was the reason to do this all, and we had learned a great deal since 2003 about why XML wasn't the right foundational technology for all data storage and interchange.
So I wrote a paper saying that this was a bad idea. This repository contains the paper, placed here so that Github could publish it and keep it current.
Since I wrote the paper, things have continued to change and I continue to run into documents that support my point. So I've collected them here, and which is also published by Github at this location
Though I have not run into many things that refute or contradict my paper, I would also throw them here if I should run into anything.
1: EXI used to be "Efficient XML Interchange" but by the time Navy got around to picking it up in 2018 was renamed "Efficient eXtensible Interchange". If that doesn't make my own point about the legacy nature XML, I'm not sure what does.