At the core of XML you can still see the SGML origins. It is great stuff if you have an actual document to work on - like, documentation, or an essay, or a manu

At the core of XML you can still see the SGML origins. It is great stuff if you have an actual document to work on - like, documentation, or an essay, or a manual... there are some very comprehensive schemas and renderers around for those use cases, that can do heavy lifting where Markdown or Word start failing you, and TeX is inappropriate. What polluted XML the most was simply being overhyped, especially as "human-readable". It's not binary, but it's also not a good front end for any human task. Although it's capable of flexible markup, that makes it an inefficient source format. Even in the case where you have a document to write, it can be more palatable to parse something simpler and convert it, and then apply finishing touches to the XML where the precision works in your favor. That said, most data is not really a document, but a tiny fragment with relations. Documents only make sense once you have some kind of story to tell.