XML still works fines as a data interchange medium. Podcasts are still a thing, for example. There's tons of XML in use where you don't see it daily, like in Ap

XML still works fines as a data interchange medium. Podcasts are still a thing, for example. There's tons of XML in use where you don't see it daily, like in Apple's .plist files. Librarians use TEI all the time. It's just in the webdev world that people are using it less. I think two steps could give XML new life: write better documentation and get browser makers to support the latest XSLT. JSON and HTML5 had great people writing inspired, lively guides early on, whereas XML documentation is uniformly bland and soul-killing. XSL has never been graced with a decently written and easily comprehensible introduction. Even if one does manage to grok XSL, the really useful features in XSLT 2 and 3 are excluded from browsers, which only support XSLT 1 like it's still 1999. Whenever one asks why the latest XML-adjacent stuff like XSLT isn't built into browsers, one hears that such processing should be done server-side, which is probably why XML is much more alive outside webdev than inside it.