XML grew out of SGML/HTML, and there's no denying that its age shows. It's kind of like going into a house built in the 90s and seeing all the little things tha

XML grew out of SGML/HTML, and there's no denying that its age shows. It's kind of like going into a house built in the 90s and seeing all the little things that just scream "90s house - that looks so dated!" Did you know that web browsers have native support for XML? Try fetching an xml resource and pulling the responseXML value off the XHR - you have another DOM object right in your hands, that you can treat just like a regular Node. The reason that XML is better than the alternatives has nothing to do with the syntax itself, but the tooling around it. Browser support, XQuery, XPath, XSD/RelaxNG, XSLT - please tell me where I can find the equivalents for any other markup language. You don't have to use them, either - but if you need them, they are there in pretty much every framework. XML had the first to market advantage, and was picked up in enterprise systems and made powerful and ubiquitous. If you need batteries included, XML is right there, the others are not. There is really nothing wrong with it, the syntax is clunky for some applications but great for documents, whereas e.g. JSON would be horrible in that scenario.