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XML wasn't intended as data interchange format, but for replacing SGML as serialization and markup meta-language on the Web (eg. for XHTML, SVG, MathML). It can

XML wasn't intended as data interchange format, but for replacing SGML as serialization and markup meta-language on the Web (eg. for XHTML, SVG, MathML). It can't be said often enough that markup languages are for authoring and delivering semistructured text data, not for general-purpose data serialization. As in, editing plain text files and have your text treated as content unless marked up with markup and annotated with metadata attributes. Though this is much more pronounced in SGML which also contains the features for authoring (as opposed to delivery) omitted from XML such as tag omission/inference, custom Wiki syntaxes, and other short forms.

Mikhail_Edoshin 8y ago
Well, what is the purpose of markup languages? Isn't the sole purpose of markup is to be able to process the marked-up content with a computer? Why would you add markup to your favorite verse if it wasn't to somehow feed it to machine for some purpose (analyze, typeset, etc.)? So when we have text with markup the text part is meant to be there for humans and the markup part is solely for computers. Now let's remove all text; now there's no content for humans at all, only for computers. How is this different from general-purpose data serialization? (Some of the samples you give, like SVG, may not have any text content at all; it's basically a drawing language.) Given that XML ecosystem has quite a few tools (e.g. several type description languages or a declarative data transformation language just to name a few) it's a very good general-purpose data serialization format.