"...That verbosity brings to mind the common complaint about XML, which is that it’s really Lisp syntax with angle brackets and a bunch of stuff inside them. Consequently Lisp is a natural way to deal with XML.

Microsoft was issued a permanent injunction against selling Microsoft Word products due to a patent infringement dispute with a Canadian company called i4i.

Microsoft knew of the patent held by i4i as early as 2001, but instead set out to make the Canadian developer's software "obsolete" by adding a feature to Word, according to court documents.

The core of US Patent 7,571,169 which Microsoft was granted on August 4th refers to – "A word-processing document stored in a single XML file that may be manipulated by applications that understand XML".

The GNU diff and patch utilities let you compare files to generate a patch that describes the changes between files. You can then apply the patch file on that machine or another. You might think to use diff and patch on XML files, since they are just text files -- and depending on your application, diff and patch might serve your needs well.

JSON is a data interchange format specified by Douglas Crockford, an alternative to XML. So, it seems to me that it's useful to know his point of view about SGML syntax compared to Scrib. Remain to know if the Web would have been different from that which we know if TBL had chosen Scrib instead of SGML for HTML syntax.