I like TeX for producing documents. But I'd take XML over TeX if I had to parse the markup myself, outside of the TeX toolchain. Any nontrivial TeX document is

I like TeX for producing documents. But I'd take XML over TeX if I had to parse the markup myself, outside of the TeX toolchain. Any nontrivial TeX document is built out of a pile of macros, so you need to implement a TeX-compatible macro expander to parse it. And at least with XML there are solid libraries, while the state of TeX-parsing libraries outside of TeX itself is pretty poor. I think Haskell is the only language with a reasonably good implementation, thanks to the efforts of the pandoc folks.