In mid-September, we reported that Nick Wellnhofer, the long-time maintainer of the widely used XML parsing library libxml2, planned to step down from the project. A few days ago, that change became official.
When looking at one of the latest commits in the project’s GitLab repository, you can now see the following notice:
“This project is unmaintained and has known security issues (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libxml2/-/issues/346). It is foolish to use this software to process untrusted data.”
That’s super underselling it. Open Financial Exchange OFX is still the go-to for markets and banks to exchange information with various end user devices. ISO 20022 is a standard used in banking that is XML based. Fedwire, the platform that moves money between the central banks completed transition to XML in July… of this year.
Credit reporting agencies, insurance agencies, hospitals, medicare, medicaid, massive amounts of the entire global logistics industry are heavily using XML with no plans in the near future to move off of it. Like the network that handles auto insurance claims and reporting them to people like LexisNexus is all XML.
Like it’s impossible to cover just how much of this planet runs on XML.
Don’t forget the OpenDocument format of LibreOffice and the other format of the other office suite. Yeah, these will be retired any day now.
Also these.
Declarative structured data is super important it turns out
It was in fact these non-browser interests that initially poisoned W3C to take the position of completely abandoning html for XML back in 2004… Where the browser companies immediately ignored the decision and formed their own working group (whatwg) which worked on almost all new web technologies post html4.
Electrical Vehicles use EXI to communicate with chargers, which is just compressed xml