The failures you speak to are a behavioral divide. XML, and its descendants, were largely the work of elite hobbyists. These are people who, more often than no

The failures you speak to are a behavioral divide. XML, and its descendants, were largely the work of elite hobbyists. These are people who, more often than not, really cared about the technologies and applied the curation, details, and precision such care requires like much of open source. This speaks to incredible initiative and great refinement to build an epic palace. In the rest of the world nobody cares. It works or it doesn't. The end. Most software developers want to believe that they are really smart people, and they just might be, but that doesn't equate to effort. Learning and extending the world of XML takes effort. My experience sitting on both sides of that fence tells me that unless you have a domineering personal investment the only thing that matters in software is employability and the semantic web did not crack that code. Employability is a primitive binary equation often reduced to a few lines on a resume.