> To answer it, we need to rewind to the year 1998. Nobody had ever heard of JSON (2002) or REST (2000) or SOAP.

But people had heard of S-expressions, which are far more appropriate for data transfer than XML.

And the canonical S-expression spec, from 1997, is rather less than 30 pages: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rivest/Sexp.txt