I didn't like the promise of XML on the web because I fetishize markup languages. I felt it is/was a good solution for the separation of data and presentation o

I didn't like the promise of XML on the web because I fetishize markup languages. I felt it is/was a good solution for the separation of data and presentation on the web. A website could simultaneously be a site for a browser and an API for native or web apps by serving the exact same documents to everyone. The server side could focus on data and the client would be responsible for the display or processing. It did the things modern JavaScript monstrosities do but natively in the browser. XForms even proposed to handle a lot of the stupid validation and state management that requires megabytes of JavaScript to handle today. Tons of resources are wasted every second parsing and running JavaScript to do the same thing browsers can do natively.