My take: too little and way too late. Don't even pay attention or else you'll waste your time. About 8 years ago I did my small part in expanding XML capabilit

My take: too little and way too late. Don't even pay attention or else you'll waste your time. About 8 years ago I did my small part in expanding XML capabilities of SQL Server. At the time XML was hot so Oracle, Microsoft, IBM raced to add native XML handling to their databases. It was going to be the next big thing. Possibly even bigger than big. XML was really hot then and many other sins were committed in its name (e.g. SOAP). Trust me, the ridiculous inefficiency of XML wasn't lost on developers working on XML technologies 8 years ago. Coming up with a more efficient binary XML format is easy. Microsoft had its version (if not several of them) and other companies had theirs. The real problem was: politics prevented people agreeing on a standard so no standard emerged. There was an eruption of creating standards based on XML (SOAP, XML Schema, XQuery). If you don't know what those terms mean it's because they all failed (despite the fact that everyone was convinced they're going to be the next big thing). In hindsight it was a terrible mistake to work on those technologies but not solve a real problem people had then: an efficient, binary XML format. If W3C did it 8 years ago, maybe it would have been worthwhile and people wouldn't feel the need to invent Protocol Buffers or Thrift. But solving this problem today is almost comically late. It has no chance of adoption.