It convinced a generation of framework designers not to bother designing a decent concrete syntax for their domain-specific languages. When the framework is sma

It convinced a generation of framework designers not to bother designing a decent concrete syntax for their domain-specific languages. When the framework is small and/or its developers probably couldn't hire a good language person anyway, this might be for the best, but it's a shame when a huge, well-funded and otherwise fairly well designed beast like WPF/Silverlight/XAML is trapped behind tasteless syntax. On a deeper level, the element/attribute distinction unnecessarily mucks up the data model, but I'm not sure how big a problem that is in practice.