I'm the first person to acknowledge unnecessary use of XML. Historically, XML is infinitely better than the custom formats we had before, where might even have

I'm the first person to acknowledge unnecessary use of XML. Historically, XML is infinitely better than the custom formats we had before, where might even have been in binary instead of textual (the horror). Of course they went overboard with XML (oh hello XSLT). But RSS feeds are a prime example for a good use of XML. Standard, validated, machine-parsable, and easily extendable data structures. For example podcast feeds are just extended RSS feeds. I don't think that projects got popular because they dropped XML but because they dropped unnecessary baggage.