I absolutely agree. Where XML shines is when you could take just the text content - strip out the all the markup elements and attributes, document, comments, et

I absolutely agree. Where XML shines is when you could take just the text content - strip out the all the markup elements and attributes, document, comments, etc - and have a text document that still makes some sort of sense. This AFAICT was actually why SVG has a few bizarre choices - such as putting all the drawing commands into attributes. A browser that doesn't understand an embedded SVG document in its HTML would be left with just the text contents.