W3C's XML (and also semantic web stuff) is an excellent example of what not to do as standardization body. XML may be important for enterprises, but what was a

W3C's XML (and also semantic web stuff) is an excellent example of what not to do as standardization body. XML may be important for enterprises, but what was achieved for the web except a decade-long meta discussing, resulting into HTML taken away (or back if you will) by browser vendors after years of stagnation? There was zero need for XML; recall XML is just a proper subset of SGML by its original developers, which was used to specify HTML until version 4. And even today, SGML is the only game in town to parse HTML (including version 5, up to minor trivialities) based on an international standard, whereas Hickson's/WHATWG's procedural parsing spec has become unmaintainable and isn't covered by a test suite, precisely because it doesn't follow a formal model, but started from a prose description of what an SGML parser does but lost track. Not a great outcome for a markup language used daily by billions of people; especially since HTML the markup language hasn't really changed for a very long time, whereas everything around it (CSS, JS) had to change drastically to make up for HTML's stagnation and first W3C's, then WHATWG's fuckups.