But you don't _need_ to abuse comments for extra (or meta-) data if you're using XML, you just use a separate namespace. It's definitely the case that XML has

But you don't _need_ to abuse comments for extra (or meta-) data if you're using XML, you just use a separate namespace. It's definitely the case that XML has features that aren't needed -- or at least, we've survived without them thus far -- but there definitely feels like more than just a smidge of only realising later why some of that complexity was present. See also: npm vs pretty much any other dependency management system.