The Song of the End-of-lifed

I posted this to xml-dev on a Friday afternoon back in 2003. No tune is required, but you can sing it to any of various tunes that fit the original if you want to.

We have fed our code with a thousand docs
  And still it cries unfed,
Though there's never a tag of all those tags
  But marks our hackers dead:
We have sent our best through the standards mess,
  Past the Borg and the Borg's own gull,
If blood be the price of SGML,
  By Charles, we ha' paid in full!

There's never a flood on the list we love
  But it trashes the posts we wrote;
There's never an ebb of sensible mail
  But the poets come out, quote unquote,
With their haiku (bad) and their limericks (worse),
  And their double dactyls too.
If blood be the price of XML,
If blood be the price of XML,
  By Jon, we ha' pushed it through!

So we'll parse our well-formed marked-up text,
  For that is our doom and our pride,
As it was when they punched on the 029
  So it is with the Code Worldwide.
Though we disagree upon every point
  To this one fact we can swear:
If blood be the price of XSLT,
If blood be the price of XSLT,
If blood be the price of XSLT,
  By James, we ha' paid it fair!
      --Not Rudyard Kipling