Its shit like this that convinces me that XML is a stupid fucking idea being pushed by idiot cocktail party architects on big company expense accounts.

My sentiments X-fscking-actly. I was in an interview today for a "real job" (been working on my own for the past 3 years). During the interview one of the folks asked me about .Net and XML. I told them, "Well, I think the entire IT industry is in a funk. To be sure over the past 8-10 years everyone has jumped on the Microsoft bandwagon and immediately embraced anything Microsoft proposed as "new and better". My opinion is that up until about 1998 that was not really a stupid thing to do. Microsoft did not really come up with any new ideas during that period. They were, during that timeframe, to the IT industry what Datsun/Toyota/Honda was to the automotive industry in the 1970's and 1980's: they could not come up with a new idea, but they were very good at recognizing good ideas and improving upon them, at least from the user's perspective. But then something terrible happened in the IT industry: Microsoft became a monopoly by systematically putting every other PC based company out of business. The "really good new ideas" vanished. My read of the "state of the art" right now is that both the Sun ONE initiative and the Microsoft .Net initiative are of the same ilk. Both are put forward because there are really no new worlds left to conquer (or at least neither company is capable of coming up with any really beneficial "new way" to use computer technology). These initiatives are merely designed to convince businesses to spend more money on IT technology. That can be said of many so-called innovations in IT technology. The difference is that this time, neither Sun ONE nor MS .Net truly provides any advantage for most businesses. XML is not the answer, XML is the question."