Was the success of XML due to the price of RAM?  The triumph of
simplicity just wishful thinking?  By Rick Jelliffe August 19,
2009 | Comments: 4  As there has been no shortage of
explanations tendered for the success of XML over the years, I
don't feel so bad about offering another one: maybe the success
of XML has little to do with XML and everything to do with the
price of RAM!  Here is the sequence: SGML comes out when RAM is
expensive, and it must be stream processed since documents are
so much bigger than physical RAM: in-memory implementations are
prohibitive. But in-memory implementations would allow random
access, which is much more useful, especially for a generation
of programmers used to DBMS and vendors needing to sell WYSIWYG
systems. So SGML does not find mass acceptance.  In the late
1980s, RAM cost about 105 per dollar, and in the early 1990s it
was cheaper but still fairly flat. But a big price fall started
in about 1996, so that by 2000 RAM was about 107 per dollar.
There is a nice table wi