Standards/Consortia: Standards Development, XML, Markup, and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 21, 2026

• New Department of State Strategic Plan Calls for Radical Change in US Role in Standards Development

  Last week, the U.S. Department of State released its Agency Strategic Plan for 2026 – 2030.

• Marcos Magueta ☛ The lost art of XML

  XML was not abandoned because it was inadequate; it was abandoned because JavaScript won. The browser won. And in that victory, we collectively agreed to pretend that a format designed for human readability in a REPL was suitable for machine-to-machine communication, for configuration, for anything requiring rigor. We relinquished the logical formalism for convenience with our tools.

• Ginger Bill ☛ The Only Two Markup Languages

  There are only two families of proper arbitrary markup languages: TeX and SGML. By arbitrary, I mean the grammar specifically, and how it can be used mark arbitrary plain text with information. And by proper, I mean the ability to have standalone nodes, user-definable nodes, nodes with attributes, and the wrapping of plain text. Everything else either lacks one of the these capabilities, or is a derivative or syntactic-makeover of TeX or SGML.

• Cloudflare ☛ What came first: the CNAME or the A record?

  While making some improvements to lower the memory usage of our cache implementation, we introduced a subtle change to CNAME record ordering. The change was introduced on December 2, 2025, released to our testing environment on December 10, and began deployment on January 7, 2026.

• YLE ☛ Tuesday's papers: Placating Trump, living rent-free, and the end of the line

  Finland's fixed-line telephones are on the verge of being consigned to history. After more than two centuries, the era will come to an end when Elisa retires its landline network on 30 June, according to Iltalehti.